affirmed corporeality believed that those who denied it of Him, glorified be He, reduced Him to nothing, while those who denied it believed that those who affirmed it attributed multiplicity to Him.”

He said:

“As for the third reason, explicitly denying corporeality raises many doubts concerning the revealed teachings about resurrection and other matters.

Among these are the difficulties this raises concerning the vision of Allah established by the authentic Sunnah. Those who explicitly deny it—I mean corporeality—fall into two groups: the Muʿtazilah and the Ashʿarīs.

As for the Muʿtazilah, this belief led them to deny the vision of Allah. The Ashʿarīs, however, sought to reconcile the two positions, but found this difficult. To reconcile them, they resorted to sophistical arguments whose weakness we shall explain when discussing the vision of Allah.

Another difficulty is that asserting that the Creator, glorified be He, is not a body appears, at first sight, to entail denying that He is in any direction. The revealed Law thus becomes ambiguous. For the sending of the prophets rests upon