Talut, the nephew of Labid ibn Aʿsam; and Talut, in turn, had taken it from Labid ibn Aʿsam, the Jewish sorcerer who had bewitched the Prophet ﷺ.”

Then the Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—prolonged the discussion until he said: “A fatwa cannot accommodate an exhaustive treatment of this subject. I shall therefore touch only on the rudiments; the intelligent may proceed and observe for themselves. The words of the early generations on this matter are preserved in many books, and here we can cite only a small portion of them.”

He went on to say: “Now, if the root of this doctrine—the doctrine (1) of negation and figurative reinterpretation—was (2) taken from the disciples of the idol-worshippers, the Sabians, and the Jews, how can any believer—indeed, any rational person—feel at ease [ق 35] following (3) the path of those who have incurred wrath and gone astray, while abandoning the path of those whom Allah has favored: the prophets, the steadfast affirmers of truth, the martyrs, and the righteous?!”

He said: “The all-embracing principle in this entire field is that Allah is to be described only with what He has described Himself, or what His Messenger has described Him with, and (4) with what the earliest forerunners described Him. One must not go beyond (5) the Quran and the hadith (6).”