I said: Nowadays the outward sense has in fact become two outward senses—one of them true and the other false.

The true outward sense is to affirm that He is Hearing and Seeing, willing and speaking, Living and Knowing; that “everything will perish except His Face”; that He created Adam with His own hand, spoke to Moses directly, and took Abraham as an intimate friend, and the like. We leave such texts exactly as they have come, understanding from them the purport of the wording in a manner befitting His Majesty, and we do not claim that they possess some contrary interpretation.

The other outward sense—false and deviant—is to assume an analogy between the Unseen and the seen, and thus to liken the Creator to His creation. Exalted is Allah far above that. His attributes are as His essence: He has no counterpart, no opposite, no equal, no likeness, no resemblance; “nothing is comparable to Him,” neither in His essence nor in His attributes. On this point the jurist and the layman stand on equal footing—and Allah knows best.

Al-Salafi said: I heard Ibn ʿAqil say: “My grandfather was the secretary of Bahaʾ al-Dawlah ibn Buwayh; he is the one who drafted the decree removing al-Taʾiʿ and appointing al-Qadir, and I still have it in my grandfather’s own handwriting.”

Abu al-Muzaffar, the grandson of Ibn al-Jawzi, relates that Ibn ʿAqil said about himself:

“I performed the pilgrimage and happened upon a pearl necklace strung on a red thread. Presently a blind old man was searching for it, offering one hundred dinars to whoever had found it. I returned it to him, and he said, ‘Take the dinars.’ I refused.

“I then traveled to Syria, visited Jerusalem, and set out for Baghdad (1). When I reached Aleppo I sought shelter in a mosque, cold and hungry. They asked me to lead them in prayer, so I did, and they fed me. It was the first day of Ramadan. They said, ‘Our imam has died; lead us in prayer for this month,’ and so I did.

“Then they said, ‘Our imam left a daughter,’ and they married me to her. I stayed with her a year and she bore me a son. She fell ill after giving birth. One day I looked at her and saw on her neck that very same necklace with its red thread. I said to her, ‘There is a story behind this,’ and I told her …”