—peace and blessings be upon him—recited: “They have not esteemed Allah as He deserves, while on the Day of Resurrection the whole earth will be in His grasp and the heavens will be rolled up in His Right Hand. Glory be to Him! Exalted is He above all that they ascribe to Him.” ⦗al-Zumar 67⦘ This is the exact wording cited by al-Bukhari in his commentary on Sūrah al-Zumar.
So what corrupt meaning could possibly arise from the plain sense of this text that would lead anyone to claim that the plain sense is not intended?
A comparable error is to treat a word as though it were parallel to something that, in fact, is not its equal.
One hears this, for example, regarding the verse, “for what I created with My two Hands” ⦗Ṣād 75⦘. Some allege that it is equivalent to the verse, “out of that which Our Hands have wrought” ⦗Yā Sīn 71⦘, and therefore maintain that in both passages “Hands” simply means the very doer Himself.
This is a mistake, for the difference between the two expressions is clear on three counts:
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Wording. In the first verse He says, “for what I created with My two Hands,” a formulation unlike that of the second verse, where He says, “out of that which Our Hands have wrought.” Were the first truly analogous to the second, it would have read, “for what My two Hands created,” linking the act of creation directly to the two Hands just as the act of fashioning is linked to them in the second verse.
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Grammatical construction. In the first verse Allah attributes the verb to Himself and then, by means of the preposition bi- (with), connects it to the two Hands: He—majestic is He—is the Creator, and His act of creating occurred by His two Hands. Consider the statement, “I wrote with the pen”: the writer performs the act, and the object introduced by “with”—the pen—is the instrument through which the writing took place.
By contrast, in the second verse, “out of that which Our Hands have wrought,” the verb is attached directly to the Hands that are ascribed to Him. To ascribe the act to the Hands is effectively to ascribe it to the Self, as though He had said, “out of what We have wrought.” Do you not see His words, “Whatever calamity befalls you is because of what your own Hands have earned” ⦗al-Shūrā 30⦘? The intent is: because of what you yourselves have earned, as is made clear by His statement in the verse