and would go so far as to speak of a stomach, intestines, genitalia, and other such things—yet Allah is infinitely exalted above all that. Glorified and Most High is He, greatly elevated above what the wrongdoers allege.

So it may be said to the one who rejects such descriptions while affirming the narrative attributes and the rest: What real difference is there between what you deny and what you affirm, once you have dismissed resemblance and considered the mere negation of likeness sufficient for affirmation? There must, in fact, be an intrinsic distinction.

[The error of basing one’s denial on the absence of textual evidence]

If he says, “The decisive criterion is the transmitted text (samʿ): I affirm whatever the text brings and leave aside whatever the text has not brought,”

the reply is: First, the transmitted text is the report of the Truthful One about how things really are. Whatever the Truthful One reports—whether as affirmation or negation—is undoubtedly true. The report is evidence for what it describes, but evidence does not work in reverse; the absence of evidence does not entail the absence of what is evidenced. Therefore, whatever the text has not mentioned may still be true in reality, so long as the text has not negated it. It is plain that the text has not negated all of these matters under their specific names, and so there remains the need to clarify what