and hates; or when they meet someone who describes Him with istiwāʾ (rising over the Throne), descent, coming, and approach, or who speaks of His face, hand, and the like—if that person objects, “This implies corporeality, for we know nothing characterized by such attributes except a body,” the affirmers answer, “You yourselves have already attributed to Him life, knowledge, power, hearing, sight, and speech; the same reasoning applies here. If only a body can possess those attributes, the same must hold for these, and if it is possible for something that is not a body to possess the first set, it is equally possible for it to possess the second. To separate the two cases is to draw a distinction where there is no real difference.”

For this reason, since refuting those who attribute deficiencies to God by that line of argument is unsound, none of the early generations or the leading imams ever adopted it. Not one of them spoke of God in terms of “body”—neither affirming nor denying it—nor of “substance,” “spatial confinement,” and the like, because such expressions are ambiguous: they neither establish a truth nor invalidate a falsehood. Hence, when censuring the Jews, Allah did not, in His Book, list among their faults