delivered in his Qur’anic commentaries in the Mosque of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ; rather, the same material is dispersed throughout his writings, especially in Adwāʾ al-Bayān (1).

Nor was the Shaykh’s command limited to the creed of Ahl al-Sunnah. He possessed a firm grasp of the positions of the speculative theologians (mutakallimīn) and the many ways in which those positions collapse. This is plainly evident in the conclusions he sets forth in these lessons and in his books. Commenting on verse 54 of Sūrat al-Aʿrāf—Allah’s words: “Indeed, your Lord is Allah, who created the heavens and the earth in six days, then rose over the Throne…” (7:54)—and after presenting the correct doctrine concerning the divine attributes and exposing the futility of the theologians’ view, he said:

“We are conveying this to you and establishing for you the way of the early generations in the light of this magnificent Qur’an, even though we have never pursued the intensive study of kalām and logic, nor the arguments by which each faction denies some of Allah’s attributes. Yet we are acquainted with every proof, with the very framework on which those proofs are built to negate certain attributes. We know how the falsehood arose, from which angle it entered, and the technical name of each proof they advance. But such detail is not appropriate in this large gathering, for only a select few would comprehend it. After a broad and lengthy examination of kalām, of the evidences cited by the various schools of speculative theology, of the rebuttals each group launches against the other, and of the logical syllogisms they have arranged in order to negate some attributes—and after learning, from revelation itself and from the debates and discussions, exactly how each of those proofs is nullified and where the error lies, and after verifying all of this—we have become utterly certain that true safety, complete safety…"