We called out” [Al-Qasas: 46], and, “when his Lord called him in the sacred valley” (1) [An-Naziʿat: 16], and the like. Nowhere does any text say, “We commanded someone to call him,” or, “Our angel called him.” To read the verses that way is sheer impossibility and outright falsehood.

A parallel case is the unvarying wording of the Prophetic report: “Our Lord descends every night to the lowest heaven and says… ” (2). Some thirty hadiths transmit this wording, all of them expressly attributing the descent to the Lord Himself. Not a single one reads, “The angel of our Lord descends,” such that one might reinterpret the plain texts by appeal to a divergent phrasing found elsewhere.

If you examine the passages on the divine attributes—passages the Jahmiyya will not even concede to be authentic “texts,” and which, when forced to respect them, they dismiss as merely “auditory appearances” contradicted by decisive rational proofs—you will find that every last one of them belongs to this same category.

What is truly astonishing is that, in their eyes, the words of their own shaykhs and authors are definitive texts that admit no interpretation, and the words of those who agree with them (3) are likewise sacrosanct and beyond reinterpretation. Yet the moment they come to the speech of Allah and His Messenger they suspend it upon interpretation and make it wholly subject to reinterpretation—after which you may say whatever you please and distort whatever you wish (4).

Do you suppose these people’s clarification of their intent is more complete than the clarification offered by Allah and His Messenger, or that they have monopolized the exposition of truths about which Allah and His Messenger remained silent? No indeed; rather, (5) it is they who are the ignorant and reckless ones (6).