or denotes a more emphatic obligation? Likewise, does the term sunnah include what is obligatory or not? There are many such verbal disputes.

These are comparable to languages and customary practices in worship: they may be praised or censured, sometimes according to revelation and sometimes according to linguistic usage, or they may be neither praised nor censured.

If, however, your dispute concerns a rational question—namely, the entity you have agreed by convention to call a “body,” something that can be pointed to, with one of you saying that it is composed of individual parts, or of matter and form, and the other denying this—then your dispute, if substantive, can be settled, sometimes through rational proofs and sometimes by other means.

Religion, however, has no need of such questions, just as it has no need of questions of astronomy and anatomy, although knowledge of them may benefit religion, as do arithmetic and medicine, or questions of grammar, language, and the like.

This category includes what he mentioned concerning bodies being alike, their powers being finite, and their being composite and dependent on something that composes them. These are questions over which rational thinkers have disagreed, while Muslims agree that Allah has no likeness, that His power has no limit, and that He is not dependent on anything else.

The affirmer thus agrees with the denier in rejecting the meaning the latter intends by the term “body.” If they dispute after this, their dispute can only be verbal. Neither party has any basis in revelation for using the term as he does—neither the one nor the other.

Revelation has therefore not remained silent about the meaning that must be denied, which the denier rejects by using the term “body”; rather, revelation has denied it.