His Book or conveyed through His Prophet ﷺ, maintaining that it is exactly as He has described Himself—in reality—without figurative reinterpretation… and so on. It is this very word, “in reality” (ḥaqīqatan), that distinguishes a Salafi from everyone who came after, for the latter are of two kinds:

1. The mufawwiḍah, who affirm only the wording of the verses and the hadiths on the Divine Attributes without affirming the true meanings befitting Allah Most High. This is the stance adopted today by many among the Khalaf who never studied the creed of the Salaf, or studied it but failed to understand it, or understood it but never absorbed it and thus did not believe in it.

   This attitude predominates among those who pose as callers to Islam—“one who lacks a thing cannot give it.” Some of them claim, in ignorance or willful neglect, that this is the way of the Salaf. Among them is al-Kawtharī, the teacher of Abū Ghuddah, as he explicitly stated in his marginalia on Ibn Qutaybah’s Ikhtilāf al-Lafẓ (p. 30).

2. The muʾawwilah muʿaṭṭilah, who invariably deny certain Divine Attributes under the banner of taʾwīl, thereby twisting the words from their rightful places. Your own teacher, al-Kawtharī, belongs to this group; indeed, he is the standard-bearer of this deviation in our age.

Now, when you said, “without taʾwīl or taḥrīf…,” you did exclude yourself—at least with your tongue, and Allah will call you to account for what lies within—from this latter group. Yet you have not absolved yourself of being among the mufawwiḍah, whose faith stops at the wording and never reaches the meanings.

So tell us: did you deliberately omit the word “in reality” from your earlier statement in order to mislead the readers and have them testify that you are Salafi? Or are you yourself unaware of the difference between these two groups?!

If you do not know, that is a calamity; and if you do know, the calamity is even greater.