the Manifest; nothing is above You. You are the Hidden; nothing is beneath You.” In this way He made it clear that nothing whatsoever can be above Him.

For that reason more than one of the leading scholars of the salaf said: “He descends to the lowest heaven, yet the Throne is never devoid of Him; He never comes to be beneath the creatures or inside them. Rather, His supremacy over them is an inalienable attribute of His for as long as any creature exists, so the Lord is never anything but exalted above it.”

As for the prophets’ words, “in heaven,” they mean “in the heights.” They do not intend that He is located within the celestial spheres; “heaven” signifies elevation. When He is above the Throne, He is the Most High, the Exalted, and there is no created thing there that could contain Him. Nor is He situated within any existent direction. In reality, there exists only the Creator and the created, and the Creator is distinct from His creatures, exalted above them; He is in no created thing at all, whether one calls that thing a “direction” or not.

Whoever maintains that He occupies a particular direction that rises above Him, surrounds Him, or is in any way needed by Him is mistaken. And just as mistaken is the one who says: “There is no Lord above the heavens, no deity upon the Throne; Muhammad was not taken up to his Lord; the angels do not ascend to Him; the scriptures do not descend from Him; nothing draws near to Him and He draws near to nothing.”

And whoever labels what lies above the universe a “direction,” treats sheer non-existence as a direction, and then says—