that He who is in heaven will not cause the earth to swallow you up?’ (al-Mulk 17), and other such verses. If one were to set allegorical interpretation loose upon them, the whole of the law would end up re-interpreted (1); and if one were to say that they belong to the mutashābihāt (ambiguous passages), the entire Sharia would become ambiguous. For every revealed law is built on the premise that Allah is in the heaven: from Him the angels descend with revelation to the prophets, from the heaven the Scriptures were sent down, and to it the Prophet ﷺ was taken by night until he was brought near the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary. All philosophers agree that Allah and the angels are in the heaven, just as (3) all the divine laws concur on this point.

The specious argument that led the negators of direction to deny it is their assumption that affirming direction entails affirming place, and that affirming place entails affirming corporeality.

We say: none of this is necessary. Direction is not the same as place. Direction is either the very surfaces of a body that surround it—six in number, whence we say a living being has above, below, right, left, in front, and behind—or it is the surfaces of another body that surrounds the body possessing those six directions. The directions that are the body’s own surfaces are in no way its place, whereas the surfaces of the bodies surrounding it (4) do constitute its place, like the surfaces of the air that envelop a human being. The surface of the celestial sphere that encloses the surfaces of the air is likewise a place (5) for the air—and so the spheres enfold one another in succession.