“Know that your Lord is exalted above accidents, motives, parts, directions, composition, corporeality, and any resemblance to creation. No one whose heart holds reverence and awe for Allah ever doubts that the Lord Most High is utterly transcendent above such things.

Yet they agreed among themselves to label His hearing, sight, knowledge, power, will, and life as ‘accidents’; to call His noble Face and His two outstretched Hands ‘parts’; to describe His rising over the Throne, His highness above His creation, and His being above His servants as ‘spatial confinement’; to term His descent to the lowest heaven, His speaking by His power and will whenever He wishes, His anger after pleasure, and His pleasure after anger as ‘events’; and to name the wise goal for which He acts and speaks a ‘motive’. These labels took root in the hearts of those who received them (1). Consequently, when the innovators openly denied those matters, the listener was plunged into the deepest confusion—torn between negating these realities, which Allah has affirmed for Himself and which all His messengers and the earliest generations of the ummah affirmed after them, and affirming them, while the testimony for their negation still echoed in his mind.

Hence, some people fled to imaginative symbolism, others to outright negation, others to a professed suspension of judgment, and others to assimilation. But there were those who fled to Allah and His Messenger, exposing the falsity of these terms, unmasking their ornamental façade and their underlying dross (2). They showed that the expressions are nothing more than gilded words, like fragrant food served in a finely colored and shaped vessel while the food itself is poisoned. Those people then declared what the unanimously acknowledged Imām of the Sunnah, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (3), had said: