the following untenable implications:

First, that Allah—exalted be He—has sent down in His Book and in the Sunnah of His Prophet ﷺ expressions whose apparent sense would mislead people and plunge them into anthropomorphism and likening Him to creation.

Second, that He left (1) the clarification of the truth and correct belief unspoken, never stating it plainly; rather, He hinted at it with cryptic symbols and riddles that could only be deciphered after extreme effort.

Third, that He obliged His servants not to understand those words according to their real and obvious meanings, but instead charged them to derive from them something they do not denote, without providing any contextual indicator to guide them to that meaning.

Fourth, that He is continually speaking on this subject in forms of discourse whose outward meaning contradicts the truth: at one time saying that He ‘rose over His Throne,’ at another that He is ‘above His servants,’ at another that He is ‘the Most High, the Exalted,’ at another that the angels ‘ascend to Him,’ at another that righteous deeds are ‘raised up to Him,’ at another that when the angels descend from on high to the lower realm they descend ‘from Him,’ at another that He is ‘Exalted in rank,’ at another that He is ‘in the heaven,’ at another that He is ‘the Manifest One above whom there is nothing,’ at another that He is ‘above [ق 14 أ] His heavens upon His Throne,’ at another that the Scripture was ‘sent down from Him,’ at another that He ‘descends each night to the lowest heaven,’ at another that He ‘will be seen with the eyes, plainly, so that the believers behold Him above their heads’—and so on through a variety of statements to that effect—while never uttering a single word that agrees with what the deniers maintain, nor in any context whatsoever stating—explicitly or implicitly—what, in their reckoning, is the correct position, nor ever clarifying it (2).