neither as words to be denied nor as words to be affirmed—whether in the Book of Allah or in the Sunnah of His Messenger ﷺ. None of the early generations or the great imams of the ummah ever employed them; they are nothing but novel expressions that the Salaf and the imams repudiated.

Second: To attribute those deficiencies to Allah is—both rationally and religiously—far more blatantly corrupt than to attribute to Him spatial confinement or corporeality. Indeed, the disbelief of anyone who ascribes such flaws to Him is self-evident in the religion, whereas the matters of taḥayyuz and tajsīm are clouded by ambiguity and are less immediately apparent.

Since describing Allah with those imperfections is more clearly false than describing Him with place or body, it is invalid to use the less obvious as proof against the more obvious. Evidence is meant to clarify and confirm the point in question, and so it must be clearer and more evident than what it proves.

Third: Those who would describe Him with such imperfections could simply say, “We hold these descriptions yet deny tajsīm and taḥayyuz,” exactly as others affirm the attributes of perfection for Allah while likewise denying tajsīm and taḥayyuz. The speech of one who ascribes perfection and that of one who ascribes imperfection would then be treated alike, and the single rebuttal offered to both would be that any affirmation of attributes inevitably entails tajsīm and taḥayyuz. This is utterly flawed and false.

Fourth: Those who made the negation of tajsīm and taḥayyuz the sole criterion for what must be denied of Allah ended up, by that very method, denying His attributes of perfection. Yet affirming those attributes is obligatory and established by both revelation and reason; therefore, anything whose negation would entail denying them is, by both revelation and reason, invalid. This exposes the unsoundness and futility of that approach.

Fifth: The proponents of this method contradict one another. Whenever one of them affirms something and denies something else, another adherent confronts him with the very point he himself had affirmed; and whenever one denies something and affirms something else, another confronts him with the very negation he had accepted.

For example, those who affirm for Allah life, knowledge, power, will, and hearing