‘Allah laughed at what you did for your guest last night.’
“And, according to what has reached us from him, he said: ‘Allah laughs at your hardship and despair, and at how swiftly you are answered.’ An Arab man asked him: ‘Does our Lord indeed laugh?’ He replied: ‘Yes.’ The man said: ‘We shall not lack goodness from a Lord who laughs.’ There are other similar reports that we have not enumerated.
“Allah Most High said:
‘And He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing.’ [al-Shūrā: 11]
‘And be patient with your Lord’s decree, for you are under Our eyes.’ [al-Tūr: 48]
“And He said:
‘So that you would be brought up under My eye.’ [Tā Hā: 39]
“And He said:
‘What prevented you from prostrating to what I created with My two hands?’ [Sād: 75]
“And He said:
‘The entire earth will be in His grasp on the Day of Resurrection, and the heavens will be folded in His right hand. Glory be to Him, and exalted is He above what they associate with Him!’ [al-Zumar: 67]
“By Allah, nothing conveyed to them the greatness of what He described concerning Himself, and of what His grasp encompasses, except their awareness of how small its counterpart is in themselves. That understanding was cast into their hearts, which He created with an innate recognition of it. Whatever Allah has described concerning Himself and named through His Messenger, we name as He named it. We do not strain to derive from it knowledge of anything beyond it. We do neither this nor that: we neither deny what He has described nor strain to know what He has not described.” End of quotation.
Since this is so, if we suppose that created things are like a ball, and that this is how He grasps them and tosses them, then He has made His greatness and the relation of created things to Himself clear to us only through something whose counterpart we can understand from our own experience.
Furthermore, what is in the Quran and hadith makes clear that, if He wills, He grasps them and does with them what He has mentioned, as He will do on the Day of Resurrection; and if He wills, He does not do so. He is able to grasp them and toss them like a ball, and the encompassing of them that this entails is evident. If He wills, He does not do so. In every case, He is separate from them and does not occupy the same place as them.
It is well known that if one of us—and to Allah belongs the highest description—has a mustard seed, he may, if he wishes, grasp it so that his grasp encompasses it; or, if he wishes, he may leave it ungrasped and place it beneath him. In either case, he is separate from it. And whether it is supposed