But if someone allows his fancy to picture Allah as resembling himself, he will inevitably picture Allah’s rising as the same as his own. Yet once he realizes that “nothing is like unto Him” in His Essence, His attributes, or His acts, he will know that Allah’s istiwāʾ (rising over) is not like the creature’s rising, nor His coming like the creature’s coming—just as His knowledge, power, pleasure, and anger are nothing like a creature’s knowledge, power, pleasure, or anger.

The two sets of names share only a broad, abstract notion, as when we speak of one who is “living” and another who is “living,” or one who is “knowing” and another who is “knowing.” Such a universal, common meaning exists solely in understanding and in the mind; in concrete reality what exists is something peculiar to the being described.

Accordingly, the attributes of the Lord—glorified and exalted—are unique to Him, and the attributes of the created being are unique to it; there is no true overlap between them, just as no two creatures are absolutely identical.

Fifth aspect:

Their statement, “Since they believe concerning the Creator—sublime is His power—that He does not possess jism,” involves using the word jism (body) for sheer magnitude and thickness, not for that which possesses magnitude and thickness. This is one of the two recognized usages of the term, and it is the more common in everyday speech, where people say of a garment, “This cloth has jism, and that one has no jism,” meaning, “this one has density and heft, whereas that one does not.”

The scholastic theologians, however, ordinarily employ the word jism for the very entity that possesses dimension; they will say of anything that subsists by itself and has extent, “It is a body.”

Because this term came to be used so frequently in dialectical discussions, they split over its meanings—linguistically, rationally, and in the Law—in ways that have misled many people. In its original linguistic sense, though, the word simply denotes the jasad (physical body of flesh).