are all the same in relation to Him; nor that He is neither inside the universe nor outside it, neither connected to it nor separate from it; nor that one may not point to Him with a physical gesture such as the finger. On the contrary, it is rigorously authenticated in the Sahih that Jabir ibn ʿAbd Allah (may Allah be pleased with him) reported that when the Prophet ﷺ delivered his monumental sermon on the Day of ʿArafah, before the largest gathering ever addressed by the Messenger of Allah, he kept asking, “Have I conveyed (the message)?” They would answer, “Yes.” He would then raise his finger toward the sky, turn it toward them, and say, “O Allah, bear witness,” repeating this several times. Such examples are numerous.

If the truth really rested in the formulas coined by these negators—who strip away the attributes affirmed in the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger—phrases like those just cited, rather than in what the Qur’an and Sunnah convey explicitly or by their plain sense, how could it be conceivable that Allah, then His Messenger ﷺ, and then the best of this Ummah would continually speak in terms whose explicit wording or apparent meaning stands in direct contradiction to—