[Chapter One: Introducing the Treatise]
[Reason for Its Composition]
Shaykh al-Islām—may Allah have mercy on him—makes clear in the book’s introduction the motive that led him to compose this work: it is a reply he entrusted to the two envoys who repeatedly came on behalf of the emirs, judges, and jurists gathered to discuss the question of the Shaykh’s release from prison.

He was summoned to appear before the judges, and this took place in the month of Ramadan of the year 706 AH, yet the Shaykh declined to attend and remained resolute in that decision, as will be mentioned (1).

He therefore handed the two envoys a copy of al-ʿAqīda al-Wāsiṭiyya (the Wāsiṭī Creed) and charged them to state that this was his creed: whoever objected to any point should record his objection together with the evidence for it, so that he might write a rebuttal. The envoys took the creed and left, then returned with a sheet of paper (2) in which no objection to his creed was mentioned at all. Instead, they had drafted the following wording:

“What is required of him to believe is that he deny for Allah any direction or spatial confinement; that he not say the speech of Allah is letters and sound subsisting with Him, but rather a meaning inherent in His essence; and that the Exalted is not to be pointed at with one’s fingers in a physical manner.

He is also required not to address the hadiths and verses concerning the divine attributes among the common folk, nor to send writings about them to other lands, nor to treat them in any related fatwa. When they showed me the paper, I wrote its reply on it extemporaneously, while the messenger was in haste.” (3)