and nobility, reducing it to a meaning many ranks beneath it. This is like removing a king from his sovereignty and assigning him a station far below true dominion.

A case in point is the Jahmiyyah’s rendering of Allah’s words, “He is the All-Compelling, above His servants” (Qur’an 6:19) and “They fear their Lord above them” (Qur’an 16:50), and verses of similar import. They claim that the “aboveness” (fawqiyyah) here is merely one of honor, as when people say, “A dirham is above a fals, and a dinar is above a dirham.” Consider how these interpreters strip away the reality of unrestricted aboveness—one of the exclusive hallmarks of Lordship that necessarily implies the magnificence of the Lord, majestic is His glory—and reduce it to no more than the idea that His worth surpasses that of the children of Adam and that He is more noble than they are.

The same applies to their construing His loftiness in this way, likening it to the superiority of gold over silver; and likewise their interpreting His istiwaʾ (establishment) upon the Throne as nothing but His power over it, as though He merely prevailed upon it. By Allah, what a wonder! Have intellects gone astray, have minds wandered (1), and have sane people ever doubted that He, exalted be He, prevails over His Throne and is fully capable of it—such that He would need to tell us so in seven separate passages of His Book, all with identical wording, none of which conveys the sense advanced by these interpreters? Is all of this praise and magnification simply to inform us that He has overcome His Throne and is able to subdue it, and that this occurred only after He created the heavens and the earth? Do you imagine (2) that for a span exceeding fifty thousand years He, exalted is He, was not dominant over the Throne nor capable of it, and that this somehow came about only after the creation of this world?

Tenth: Interpreting a word with a meaning for which neither the context supplies any evidence nor any external indicator requires. Such an interpretation is not what a clarifying, guiding speaker intends; for had he meant it, he would have surrounded his words with clues that point to the sense contrary to the apparent, so as not to plunge the listener into confusion.