[How the theologians combined ignorance with falsehood]:

This corrupt assumption produced a claim whose essence is to fling Islam behind one’s back. They fabricated lies about the method of the early generations and went astray by validating the method of the later theologians. In so doing they united two kinds of ignorance: ignorance of the Salaf’s path, shown in the falsehoods they attributed to it, and ignorance coupled with misguidance in declaring the Khalaf’s path sound.

The root of the problem is their conviction—born of the same rotten doubts they share with their unbelieving counterparts—that, in reality, no attribute exists to which these scriptural texts point. Having denied the attributes, yet still needing to assign some meaning to the texts, they wavered between merely affirming the wording while consigning the meaning to Allah (which they label “the way of the Salaf”) and forcing the wording into contrived interpretations (which they call “the way of the Khalaf”). Thus this falsehood