and those practitioners of speculative theology who come to hold that the evidence is evenly balanced and fall into perplexity do so only because their reasoning is flawed—whether through their own shortcomings or because their evidence is unsound. Among the greatest causes of this are ambiguous expressions whose meanings are easily confused.
Those who oppose the Quran and Sunnah with their own statements have built their position upon a corrupt foundation: they have treated their invented statements as definitive and made them the foundations of their religion, while treating the words of Allah and His Messenger as indeterminate statements from which neither knowledge nor guidance can be gained. Thus, they have treated their own ambiguous statements as definitive, and the definitive words of Allah and His Messenger as ambiguous. Such is the practice of the Jahmīs among the philosophers, the Mu'tazilah, and others like them. They have devised statements by which they deny Allah’s attributes, deny that He will be seen in the Hereafter, deny His being above His creation, and deny that the Quran is His speech, along with other such matters. They treat these statements as definitive, while interpreting the words of Allah and His Messenger to conform to them, rejecting those words, or disregarding them and seeking no guidance from them. Thus, you find one of them saying:
“He is neither a body, nor a substance, nor an accident. He has neither quantity nor quality. Neither accidents nor newly occurring events, nor anything of the kind, inhere in Him. He is neither separate from the world nor outside it.”
If they are told, “Allah has informed us that He possesses knowledge and power,” they reply:
“If He possessed knowledge and power, it would necessarily follow that accidents inhere in Him, that He is a body, and that He has quality and quantity. All of this is ruled out concerning Allah, for the reasons already given.”
You may then say:
“By the names and attributes of Allah that he mentioned, the Messenger intended things we do not know.”
Or you may say:
“He intended to address the general public and give them an understanding of the matter that did not correspond to its reality, because this served their best interests.”
He may interpret one attribute in terms of another, as when he interprets love, pleasure, and anger