nor separate from it, or that, when invoking Him, the servant should not direct himself upwards rather than towards any other direction?! Indeed, for all the negations the Jahmiyyah advance and claim to be true, they have not a single word of support from Allah’s Book, the Sunnah of His Messenger, or the statements of any of this community’s early generations and leading scholars. Rather, the Book, the Sunnah, and the statements of the early generations and leading scholars abound in evidence contrary to their position.

Yet they say:

“The apparent meaning of this is disbelief, so we reinterpret it or consign the matter to Allah.”

According to their position, then, the Book, the Sunnah, and the statements of the early generations and leading scholars contain nothing on this subject whose apparent meaning is not disbelief, and nothing on this subject that expresses faith. The negation they claim to be the truth—which, in their view, every believer, or the select among the believers, must hold—was never uttered by any messenger, prophet, or heir to the prophets and messengers. What the prophets and their heirs did utter is not, in their view, the truth; rather, its apparent meaning contradicts the truth. Indeed, their most adept thinkers know that it contradicts the truth both outwardly and inwardly.

Some of them, however, claim that the prophets could only address people in terms contrary to the hidden truth, and so obscured the matter and lied for the benefit of the common people.

They should therefore be asked:

“Why, then, did they not disclose this hidden truth to their intelligent and virtuous intimates, if what you claim is true?”

It is well known that the messengers’ intimates likewise affirmed Allah’s attributes, and that none of them ever voiced such negation—unless someone falsely attributes it to one of them. One example is the statement attributed to ‘Umar:

“The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and Abū Bakr would converse, while I was like a black African between them.”

This is fabricated, by agreement of the scholars. The same applies to the claim attributed to ‘Alī and his household that they possessed hidden knowledge contrary to the outward knowledge held by the majority of the community.