or with which His Messenger described Him on His behalf—without adding any wording of our own or exercising any personal will. What the Muslim is required to do (1) is to convey the text as it stands and to be certain in his heart that whatever Allah has described of Himself in the Qur’an are truly His attributes. No commissioned prophet nor any angel brought near can grasp those attributes except as the names by which the Lord—blessed and exalted is He—has acquainted them. As for anyone from the children of Adam comprehending the reality of those attributes, no one can do so. Allah, exalted is He, has only spoken of His attributes to the extent that the minds of people of understanding can bear (2), so that their faith may rest upon that and their knowledge that He is indeed the One described by what He has said of Himself. No one knows His limit, nor the limit of His attributes. What is binding upon the Muslim is to affirm the knowledge of Allah’s attributes by following the texts and submitting to them as they have come.

Whoever lacks this understanding to the point that he says, “I merely recount what Allah has said, yet I do not know (3) what any of it means,” and this finally leads him to a statement akin to that of the Jahmiyyah—saying, “His hand (4) means His favor,” and adducing as proof His words,

“Have they not seen that We created for them, out of what Our hands created, cattle…?” (5)

and similar arguments—has indeed gone far astray (6) from the straight path. This is pure Jahmiyyah speech: they profess belief in all the attributes of Allah that we have enumerated (7), yet they distort the meanings of those attributes, wrenching them from the sense in which Allah described Himself, until they end up saying that the meaning of

“the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing” (8)

is that the Hearing is the Seeing and the Seeing is the Hearing, and they turn the hand into a hand