of the prophets, which are numerous, in favor of what certain expressions may admit because it accords with their desires. In doing so they followed nothing but

“conjecture and the whims of the soul, despite the fact that true guidance had already come to them from their Lord.” ⦗Q 53:23⦘

The unbelieving anthropomorphists, for their part, are actually more excusable and less steeped in unbelief than the Christians. Together with the attribute-deniers, they insist that the outward, prima-facie sense of all the scriptures is anthropomorphism. In the Torah and the Quran alone there are countless verses whose surface meaning seems to imply corporeality, yet in none of them is there a single text that states what the deniers allege: that Allah is neither inside the universe nor outside it, neither connected to it nor separate from it; that He is not above the Throne; that He cannot be pointed to; that nothing ascends to Him or descends from Him; that nothing comes near Him, nor does He draw near to anything—and the rest of the sweeping negations advanced by those who reject the divine attributes.

It is plain, therefore, that not one letter of the divine books—the Torah, the Gospel, the Psalms, the Quran, or any of the other revelations—contains such statements, whereas they are all brimming with passages that, according to these objectors, amount to anthropomorphism. Hence they declare, “We have adhered to the texts of the prophets, we have not turned away from them to anything else, and within their words we have found no clear, unequivocal passage that endorses the blanket negations put forward by the attribute-deniers.”