—a mighty thing indeed”—would, in the view of these heretics, be better than Allah’s words describing Himself, His angels, and the Last Day, and better than the words of His Messenger. For although Musaylima’s Quran contains neither benefit nor advantage, it contains neither harm nor corruption either; it merely makes the listener laugh, as people laugh at similar things.

According to these people, however, the words of Allah and His Messenger have led people astray, corrupted their minds and religions, and caused them to believe the opposite of the truth concerning faith in Allah and His messengers, or to doubt and be uncertain about the truth. Alternatively, if they discover the truth through their own reason, they must toil greatly to interpret those words away from what they signify and entail, to turn people away from believing their content and import, and to show hostility towards those who affirm them—the overwhelming majority of the messengers’ followers.

We mention this only because many Jahmī negationists say that the benefit of revealing these texts affirming the attributes, and other such beneficial teachings—which they call problematic and ambiguous—lies in scholars striving to divert them from what they entail by means of evidence that contradicts them. In their view, this enables souls to experience the toil of such striving and spurs them to reflection and reasoning based on rational proofs that contradict these texts and lead to the truth.

Thus, their position amounts to saying that the messengers addressed people with words that neither clarify the truth, nor point to knowledge, nor convey guidance, but instead point to falsehood and convey misguidance. The benefit people derive from a messenger’s discourse would therefore consist in their striving to refute what the messengers openly declared and conveyed to them, and in their consequently engaging in reasoning