from Him who is in heaven?” (Al-Mulk 15–16). Here the preposition fi conveys the sense of “above,” and the proofs for this are numerous—indeed, very numerous. One of them is the ḥadīth just cited, so often repeated on people’s tongues, which, taken together through its various chains, is—praise be to Allah—authentic. The Prophet ﷺ said, “Show mercy to those on the earth,” and his words do not refer to insects and worms buried inside the soil; rather, they mean those who are upon the earth—human beings and animals. This corresponds perfectly to his saying, “…and the One in heaven will show you mercy,” that is, the One above the heaven. Such fine points must be clear to anyone who answers the call of truth.

A related illustration is the well-known ḥadīth of the slave-girl who tended sheep. I will quote only the relevant part. When the Messenger of Allah ﷺ asked her, “Where is Allah?” she replied, “In heaven.”(1) Were you to ask, say, the senior shaykhs of al-Azhar today, “Where is Allah?” they would tell you, “He is everywhere!” Yet the slave-girl answered, “He is in heaven,” and the Prophet ﷺ approved her answer. Why? Because she spoke according to the innate disposition (fiṭra). She lived in what we might, in contemporary language, call a “Salafi environment” that had not been tainted by any corrupt milieu, for she had—so to speak—graduated from the school of the Messenger of Allah