to that, and you must not issue a fatwa (1) to anyone on these passages that contains any form of negation. Only then will your demand that others do as you have done be just. As for a man who comes to these texts, subjects them to every kind of distortion and allegorical twisting, whether wholesale or in detail, and then says to the people of knowledge and faith, “You are not to oppose me (2) or speak (3) about them,”—this is among the gravest manifestations of ignorance, injustice, and heretical deviation regarding Allah’s names and His verses.
Eleventh point: The earliest generations of this ummah and its leading imams consistently spoke about, issued verdicts on, and conveyed to both commoners and scholars alike what the Book and the Sunnah contain concerning the Divine attributes. The material on this topic in the works of tafsir, hadith, and the sunan is so abundant that only Allah could enumerate it. When later scholars gathered the sciences (4) and arranged them into written collections, Ibn Jurayj (5) compiled works of tafsir and sunan,
(1) In the original it reads “yuftā.” The printed edition confirms this reading.
(2) In the printed edition: “lā tuʿāriḍūn.”
(3) In the printed edition: “walā tukallimū.”
(4) The words enclosed in brackets are an addition from the printed edition.
(5) He is Abū al-Walīd ʿAbd al-Malik ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Jarīrīj, the muḥaddith, ḥāfiẓ, and faqīh, the first to compile books in Mecca; born in 80 AH and died in Baghdad in 150 AH. Among his works is al-Sunan.
Fuad Sezgin writes in his History of Arabic-Islamic Heritage – Quranic and Hadith Sciences (vol. I/1, p. 167): “We have not yet found it; however, a collection of his ḥadīths exists in the Tahdhīb by Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Mukhlad ibn Ḥafs al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 331 AH) under the title What the Elders Narrated from Mālik ibn Anas, Yahyā al-Anṣārī, and Ibn Jarīrīj.”
Among his other works is the Tafsīr. Sezgin adds in the same reference: “It appears to draw on the tafsīrs of Ibn ʿAbbās, Ikrima, Mujāhid, and ʿAṭāʾ ibn Abī Rabāḥ, and al-Ṭabarī excerpted it via al-Qāsim ibn al-Ḥasan al-Hamdhānī (d. 272 AH) from al-Ḥusayn ibn Dāwūd al-Muṣayyiṣ (d. 226 AH) from Ḥajjāj ibn Muḥammad al-Muṣayyiṣ (d. 206 AH)…”.
See for a translation: Ibn Saʿd’s al-Ṭabaqāt al-Kubrā, vol. 5, pp. 491–492. And al-Jarḥ =