Fourth: The Imām upholds the legitimacy of asking about Allah’s transcendence with the very wording, “Where is Allah?”—the question the Messenger of Allah ﷺ put to the slave-girl to ascertain her faith. I then said to him:

“Your own shaykh, Abū Ghuddah, rejects such a question because he casts doubt on the hadith’s authenticity, as noted earlier (p. 22). So do you accept this hadith and permit the question that the Prophet ﷺ asked?”

Fifth: The Imām—following the other three Imāms and many scholars—maintains that faith (īmān) consists of affirmation in the heart, utterance with the tongue, and action with the limbs; they also held that it increases and decreases.

Sixth: The Imām regarded it as permissible to attach an exception when speaking of one’s faith, saying, “I am a believer, if Allah wills,” contrary to the Ḥanafīs, a group of whom even declared anyone who said this to be an unbeliever.

Seventh: The Imām—after his own Imām, Abū Ḥanīfah, and his two companions—considered it disliked to seek nearness to Allah by invoking the right or status of the Prophets.

I then added:

“I said: These are seven important matters—six of them doctrinal—addressed to Abū Ghuddah, who pretended to praise the commentator on al-Ṭaḥāwiyyah and styled him a man of ‘tangible, widely recognised leadership.’ If he responds by following the commentator on these points, and that I find unlikely given his Kawtharī bias, then praise be to Allah. But if he contradicts him and remains upon his Kawtharī stance, it will become clear to everyone, Allah willing, that his praise for the commentator (the Imām) did not stem from conviction and trust, as he claimed; rather, he used it as a ladder to disparage the transmitter of the hadiths. Otherwise, how could he have remained silent about the commentator’s errors—indeed, his deviations…"