and to their assemblies of debauchery and flagrant sin they give the enticing name “wholesome gatherings.” Indeed, when one of them was reproved for any of this he retorted to his admonisher: “Avoiding sins and fearing them is to think ill of Allah’s mercy and to show temerity toward the vastness of His pardon and forgiveness.” Consider what such a remark does to a heart filled with desires yet weak in knowledge and insight.

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The second tactic is to present the meaning he wishes to invalidate—by forced interpretation—in so repugnant a guise that hearts recoil from it and ears shrink at its mention. To that end he chooses for it the most distasteful expressions, those farthest from gaining entry to the heart and most effective at driving it away, so that the listener imagines that the sense conveyed by those ugly words is the very doctrine itself. Thus he calls devotion “heavy dullness,” he brands keeping one’s distance from fools, libertines, and idlers as “bad manners,” and he labels enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, becoming angry for Allah’s sake, and displaying protective zeal for His religion as “sedition, evil, and meddlesomeness.”

Likewise (1), the people of innovation and misguidance in all their factions magnify the phrases by which they repel others from the truth and invite them to falsehood. They call the affirmation of Allah’s perfect attributes “corporealism,” “likening Him to creation,” and “assimilation.” They describe affirming His Noble Face and outstretched Hands as “composition,” and affirming His rising (istiwaʾ) over the Throne and His exaltedness above His creation, over His heavens, as “spatial confinement” and “corporeality.” They declare the Throne to be a “space” and a “direction.” They label the attributes as “accidents,” the actions as “events,” the Face and Hands as “parts,” and the wise purposes and ends for which He acts as “motives.” After attaching these odious, repulsive terms to those sound and firmly established meanings, they were able to deny and discard them at will, whereupon they said to the simpletons and the gullible: