to believe in the very wording of the Qur’an and the hadith, yet without any insight or understanding of what Allah, Exalted is He, and His Messenger intended by them. They imagined that the early Muslims were on a par with the unlettered folk about whom Allah has said, “And among them are lay people who know nothing of the Book save wishful fancies” (2:77), while the later generations, they claimed, were the true luminaries of learning who had outstripped all rivals, reached the final goal, and carried off spoils that escaped the first forerunners. In their eyes, the task of the Khalaf was to extract the meanings of the texts and to divert them from their real import by deploying every kind of metaphor, exotic idiom, and far-fetched interpretation.

This corrupt notion produced the claim whose substance is to fling the Book, the Sunnah, and the statements of the Companions and Followers ⦗ق 3 أ⦘ behind their backs. Thus they combined ignorance of the way of the Salaf with lies about them, and combined ignorance and misguidance in endorsing the way of the Khalaf. The root of the matter is their conviction that, in reality, none of the attributes indicated by these texts actually exists. Once they embraced taʿṭīl—the negation and removal of the divine attributes—and nevertheless recognized that the texts must bear some meaning, they vacillated between affirming the wording while consigning the meaning (which, in their view, is the way of the Salaf) and diverting the wording from its true sense and original designation to one for which it was never coined and which it in no way denotes, by means of assorted figures of speech and strained contrivances (1) that resemble riddles and puzzles more than they resemble clarity and guidance, as will be explained in detail, Allah willing.

This falsehood thus became a compound of corrupted reasoning and ignorance of transmitted evidence: neither sound report nor sound intellect remained. Their negation and denial rest on spurious doubts they imagined to be valid rational proofs; for their sake they distorted the scriptural texts and wrenched them from their contexts. When their entire edifice was built upon these two lying premises, the inevitable outcome was to deem