He likewise says, “So We sent to her Our spirit” ⦗Maryam 19:17⦘—up to His words: “I am but a messenger of your Lord, that I may grant you a pure boy” ⦗Maryam 19:19⦘. This shows that the expression “Our spirit” is not meant to denote one of Allah’s attributes—neither life nor anything else—nor is it the Lord, the Creator, Himself. It is therefore neither the Creator nor an attribute of the Creator; rather, it is a spirit from among the spirits that Allah has chosen and honored, just as was mentioned earlier in the verse, “So We sent to her Our spirit” ⦗Maryam 19:17⦘, and the majority hold that it is Gabriel.

The principle we have stated—distinguishing, in what is ascribed to Allah, between His attributes and what He owns—is a momentous one in which many people of the earth, from every religious community, have erred. The prophetic scriptures—the Torah, the Gospel, the Quran and others—attribute things to Allah in both ways, and people have disagreed over these attributions. The Muʿaṭṭila, the deniers of the attributes from among the adherents of all faiths, maintained that every such attribution is merely an attribution of ownership, and that Allah possesses no intrinsic life, knowledge, power, speech, love, hatred, anger, or pleasure; rather, they claimed, all of that is simply something created among His creations.

This was the first innovation introduced into Islam by the Jahmites, and they only brought it about after the era of the Companions and the leading Successors had come to an end. Their forerunner was a man named Jahm ibn Ṣafwān.