he concludes that, were the Throne to vanish, the Lord—exalted is He—would fall. Then he tries, in his own estimation, to disavow this consequence, saying: “His istiwāʾ (establishment) is neither sitting nor settling.”

He does not realize that whatever is said about the words “sitting” (quʿūd) and “settling” (istiqrār) applies equally to the word “istiwāʾ.” If the notion of need or dependence were inherent in those terms, there would be no difference between establishment, sitting, and settling; in that sense, God is neither established, nor settled, nor sitting. But if that notion is not contained in their meaning—any more than it is contained in the meaning of istiwāʾ—then to affirm one of them and deny the other is sheer arbitrariness.

Granted, the lexical range of “establishment,” “settling,” and “sitting” is not identical, and the distinctions are well known. The point here, however, is to expose the mistake of someone who negates a thing while affirming its near equivalent.

This error arises from his initial misunderstanding of the divine establishment upon the Throne, imagining it to resemble a human’s sitting on the backs of beasts or on the decks of ships. Yet nothing in the wording indicates such a likeness, for God has attributed the istiwāʾ to His noble Self just as He has attributed all His other acts and attributes to Himself, saying that He created