and none of His actions resembles the rising of created beings, just as Allah Himself bears no resemblance to creation.

Have you not considered His words: “And the heaven We built with [Our] might” (adh-Dhāriyāt 51:47)? Would anyone imagine that His construction of it is like a creature’s erecting the roof of a house, where one must fetch baskets and shovels, mould bricks, mix clay, and the like? Since He needs none of that for this act of His, it follows that He is not in need of the Throne when He rises over it. Rather, exalted is He—self-sufficient with no need of the Throne or anything else.

Thus you will find that denying the true reality of istiwāʾ, which is the plain sense of the revelatory texts, falls into four errors:
• He likens what he imagines of Allah’s rising over the Throne to the rising of created beings.
• He strips the texts of their indication of an istiwāʾ befitting Allah, then twists them toward meanings they do not bear.
• His denial and nullification rest on no knowledge at all, but on ignorance and faulty conjecture.
• By rejecting this attribute of perfection contained in istiwāʾ, he necessarily affirms for Allah an attribute of deficiency by eliminating that perfection.

Another example is His statement: “Do you feel secure from the One who is in the heaven that He will not cause the earth to swallow you when it quakes?” (al-Mulk 67:16). Someone may wrongly imagine that Allah is inside the heaven and that the heaven surrounds Him, just as when we say, “So-and-so is in the room,” meaning that the room encloses him. On the strength of this misconception he denies that Allah is “in the heaven,” claiming instead that what is in the heaven is merely His dominion, His authority, and so forth.

The root of this misconception is the assumption that the preposition fī, which ordinarily denotes location, always carries the same meaning in every context. This is a mistaken notion, for fī varies in meaning according to the word to which it is attached; it distinguishes