Whoever understands that maʿiyyah (divine accompaniment) is ascribable to every class of created beings—just as lordship (rubūbiyyah) is; that istiwāʾ (rising over) applies exclusively to the Throne; and that God is characterized by real height and exaltation, never by lowness or inferiority in any sense, literal or figurative—will know that the Qur’an is to be accepted as it is, without distortion.
[The Meaning of “God is in heaven”]
Anyone who fancies that God’s being “in heaven” implies that the heaven surrounds and contains Him is a liar if he claims to have quoted it from someone else and is misguided if he believes it of his Lord. We have never heard anyone understand the wording that way, nor seen anyone cite it from another. Were all Muslims asked, “Do you take from God’s and His Messenger’s statement that ‘God is in heaven’ the notion that heaven contains Him?” each would hasten to say, “Such a thought has never even crossed our minds.”
Given this, it is sheer affectation to insist that the apparent sense of the phrase is something impossible that people do not actually gather from it, and then to seek some strained reinterpretation. Rather, among Muslims the settled conviction is that God is