I say:

One might respond: As for his statement, “Many Muslims have come to say that He is a body unlike other bodies,” this is correct.

As for his statement, “This is the position of the Hanbalīs and many of their followers,” the response is:

None of the Hanbalīs has applied the term “body” to Allah. Rather, those who deny the attributes call anyone who affirms them a corporealist on the grounds of a necessary implication, when they maintain that an attribute can subsist only in a body. This is because they have assigned the word “body” a technical meaning different from its familiar linguistic meaning. In ordinary language, “body” means the physical body, whereas these people call anything that can be pointed to a body. Thus, according to their position, what the Quran and Sunnah teach, what Allah has innately disposed His servants to recognize, and what the early generations of the Muslim community and its imams unanimously affirmed would all constitute corporealism.

This is not confined to any particular group, whether the Hanbalīs or others. Rather, they apply the labels “corporealists” and “those who liken Allah to His creation” to all followers of the early generations. They even say in their books: “Among them is a group called the Mālikīs, who affiliate themselves with Mālik ibn Anas, and another group called the Shāfi‘īs, who affiliate themselves with al-Shāfi‘ī.”

But when the ordeal instigated by the Jahmiyyah, who denied the attributes, took place during the time of Imam Ahmad, they called those who affirmed the attributes corporealists. They said, “The Quran is created”—which in reality meant that Allah had not spoken anything—and said that He would not be seen, along with similar claims. Ahmad ibn Hanbal then proclaimed the Sunnah and the divine attributes, affirming what the Quran and Sunnah teach in this regard to an extent that other imams had not needed to. This became evident among all the adherents of the Sunnah