I said: As for his question about taking the Quran according to its apparent sense, then if he believes in what Allah has described of Himself and what His Messenger (1) has described Him with—without taḥrīf (distortion) or takyīf (speculating about the “how”)—he has followed the path of the believers. The term “apparent” (al-ẓāhir) in the usage of the later scholars has, however, become equivocal. If by taking it upon its apparent sense he intends the sense that is (2) characteristic of created beings so that he likens Allah to His creation, this is misguidance. One must, rather, affirm categorically that Allah, exalted is He, is like nothing whatsoever—neither in His Essence, nor in His attributes, nor in His actions. Ibn ʿAbbās—may Allah be pleased with them both—said, “Nothing in this world resembles what is in Paradise except the names (3).” That is, the gold, silk, wine, and milk that Allah has promised in Paradise differ in their realities from the realities of these same things that exist in this world; how much further removed, then, is Allah—exalted be He—from resembling His creatures in a manner beyond human comprehension. His reality is (4) not like the reality (5) of anything at all.

But if, by taking it upon its apparent sense, he intends the sense understood by the predecessors of this Ummah—so that he neither distorts the words from their proper places, nor deviates concerning the names of Allah, nor explains the Quran and the hadith in a way that opposes the interpretation of the predecessors and Ahl al-Sunnah, but instead leaves them upon what the texts entail, in agreement with the proofs of the Book and the Sunnah and the consensus of the early generations—then he is correct in that, and that is the truth.