Among those hadiths is the Prophet’s—peace and blessings be upon him—statement: “You will indeed behold your Lord on the Day of Resurrection just as you behold the full moon on a clear night and just as you behold the sun when no cloud veils it; you will not crowd one another in order to see Him—or: you will not jostle one another to see Him.” (1)

He means that you will not have to push and shove to gaze upon Allah, for every believer will see the Lord while standing in his own place, without congestion—just as people see the sun or the moon without pressing toward them. When an object is on earth and partly hidden, people customarily gather and compete for a glimpse, but when it is high above, like the sun and the moon, each observer sees it from where he stands. If this holds true for created bodies such as the sun and the moon, then how much more so for the Creator, Magnified and Exalted.

No one denied the Beatific Vision except the innovators—the Jahmiyyah and the Muʿtazilah—who argued that affirming it would place Allah in a particular direction. In their doctrine Allah is in no direction at all: not inside the universe nor outside it, not above nor below, neither to the right nor to the left. Such a notion, in fact, implies that He does not exist—exalted is Allah above what they maintain. Thus they rejected the vision on the basis of this baseless conjecture.