I add: The scholars of the early generations explained every technical term—important or otherwise—leaving nothing that could still be clarified. Yet when it came to the Qur’anic verses and prophetic reports that speak of the divine attributes, they never touched them with interpretation at all, even though these are the most crucial matters of faith. Had interpreting them been permissible, or indeed obligatory, they would have hastened to do so. It is therefore certain that the correct course is to recite them and pass them on exactly as they have come; there is no other explanation. We believe in them and remain silent, following the path of the Salaf, convinced that they are attributes of Allah Most High, whose true realities He has kept to Himself, and that they bear no resemblance to the attributes of created beings—just as His sacred Essence is unlike the essences of His creatures. Both the Book and the Sunnah affirm these attributes, and the Messenger ﷺ conveyed them without offering any interpretation, despite the Creator’s statement, “so that you may make clear to the people what has been sent down to them” (al-Naḥl 16:44). Our duty, then, is to believe and submit to the revealed texts, and Allah guides whom He wills to a straight path.

ʿAbdān ibn Muḥammad al-Marwazī said: Abū Saʿīd al-Ḍarīr narrated to us: I was in the presence of the governor ʿAbd Allah ibn Ṭāhir when news came of Abū ʿUbayd’s death, whereupon he began to recite:

O seeker of knowledge, Ibn Sallām has passed away—
a valiant knight of learning who never shrank from the fray.
Gone is the man who among us was one-quarter of the four;
no master of legal rulings has met their like before.
Foremost of them is ʿAbd Allah, the best of all creation;
then ʿĀmir—what an excellent follower and fine continuation!
Those two rose above the rest, and with them stood the two Qāsims:
Ibn Maʿn and Ibn Sallām, paragons of the learned classes. (1)

Abū ʿAmr al-Dānī mentions Abū ʿUbayd in his work “Ṭabaqāt al-Qurrāʾ,” saying:
“He received the Qur’anic recitation, both by presentation and by audition, from al-Kisāʾī, from Shujāʿ, from Ismāʿīl ibn Jaʿfar, from Ḥajjāj ibn Muḥammad, from Abū Mushir…,” until he says: “and he was the leading imam of the people of his time in…"