[The Way of the Salaf: A Middle Course between Negation and Anthropomorphism]
The stance of the early Muslims (salaf) lies between taʿṭīl (denial of the attributes) and tamthīl (anthropomorphic likening). They do not liken Allah’s attributes to the attributes of His creation—just as they do not liken His essence to the essences of created beings—nor do they negate from Him anything with which He has described Himself or with which His Messenger ﷺ has described Him. Were they to do so, they would be stripping His most beautiful names and His exalted attributes of their meaning, distorting the words from their proper contexts, and deviating with respect to Allah’s names and His signs.

[Denial Is Anthropomorphism, and Anthropomorphism Is Denial]
Each of the two camps—those who negate and those who anthropomorphize—actually combines both errors.

As for the deniers (muʿaṭṭilah), they grasp from Allah’s names and attributes nothing but what is appropriate to created beings, and then set about rejecting those very notions. Thus they bring together anthropomorphism and denial: first they liken, then they negate. In doing so they equate the meaning of His names and attributes with the meanings of the names and attributes of His creatures, while simultaneously denying the names and attributes that are truly befitting of Him, exalted be He.