the prophets, peace be upon them, and by those to whom they spoke. Yet the word itself is one of the ambiguous expressions, and many of their later followers went on to invest it with a false meaning.

Many of the unbelievers even claimed that Allah, exalted be He, has sons and daughters and that the angels are His daughters. Some philosophers who assert the eternity of the universe say that the ten intellects are His sons and the celestial souls His daughters, generated from Him and inseparable from His essence.

The Qur’an—the finest and most perfect of all scriptures—came to invalidate these ideas and to forbid using that term with respect to Allah Most High. It declares Him far above taking a child, just as it declares Him far above having one.

The first negation concerns holding Him aloof from blameworthy actions, and that is the view of the vast majority of Muslims and others who exalt and sanctify Allah above disgraceful acts unbefitting Him—acts that run contrary to the perfection due to Him in His deeds, just as perfection is due to Him in His essence and attributes.

As for those—whether Muslim or otherwise—who absolve Allah of nothing save what is intrinsically impossible, they say that when an act is possible and within His power, its non-existence can be known only by explicit revelation or by an unbroken custom of nature that could nevertheless be overturned. On such a view, nothing remains by which to deny that Allah might perform blameworthy and ugly deeds.

Yet the divine scriptures have indeed declared the Lord—glorified and exalted—to be above shameful actions, just as they have declared Him above attributes of deficiency, as when He, the Exalted, says: