and they would have been renowned for it, just as they were renowned for the Quran (1) and the hadith narrations. Abū ʿUmar therefore pointed out that if the notions these people introduce (2) into the fundamentals of the religion and into tawḥīd—such as affirming or denying that Allah is a body, affirming or denying anthropomorphism, and adducing motion and rest as proofs—had really belonged to the religion, the leading members of this nation would not have neglected them (3); hence it is evident that they are not part of the religion. The writings of the scholars of the ummah on this question are voluminous, but our purpose here is simply to alert the reader to the fact that what these people have dubbed tawḥīd, equating it with the negation of corporealism and anthropomorphism, is merely an innovation: Allah did not send His messengers with it, nor did He reveal His scriptures about it. Even their own keenest minds have admitted as much, as Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī noted in his book Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm ad-Dīn (4), a point that Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī also endorsed in his Minhāj al-Qāṣidīn (5) when he enumerated the names that
(1) In al-Tamhid: “They made it as widely known as they made the Qur’an known.”
(2) In the original: “yadkhul” (enters). The reading most appropriate to the context is confirmed by manuscripts S and T.
(3) In the original, manuscript S reads “aḍāʿūhu” (“they lost it”); manuscript T preserves “wa huwa mā yastaqīm bihi al-kalām,” which renders the discourse coherent.
(4) al-Ghazali, Ihya ’Ulum al-Din, vol. I, pp. 33–34. I quote here a passage from that work to clarify for the reader what appears in the following parentheses in the Mukhtasar Minhaj al-Qāsidīn, since I have not consulted al-Minhāj itself. Al-Ghazali writes:
“The third sense of the term tawḥīd (monotheism): it has now become a rhetorical craft, the knowledge of dialectical method, mastery of opponents’ refutations, and the capacity to display these skills by multiplying questions, arousing doubts, and composing sophistical syllogisms, so that groups among themselves have come to be called the People of Justice and Monotheism (ahl al-ʿadl wa-al-tawḥīd), and the theologians (ʿulamā’) have been called ‘Scholars of Monotheism’ (ʿulamā’ al-tawḥīd). Yet all that is peculiar to this art was unknown in the early period; on the contrary, they (the early scholars) sternly reproached anyone who opened the door to debate and dispute. As for what the Qur’an contains of manifest proofs that immediately incline the mind to accept them upon first hearing, this was known to everyone; knowledge of the Qur’an was the sum total of knowledge. Their conception of tawḥīd was something else—something most theologians neither understood nor embodied—namely, to perceive all matters as from God, exalted be He, in a vision that severs attention from causes and intermediaries. This is a noble rank, one of whose fruits is reliance (tawakkul), contentment, and submission to God’s decree.”
(5) He is Abu al-Faraj ’Abd al-Rahman ibn ’Ali ibn Muhammad ibn ’Ali al-Baghdadi al-Hanbali.