Next, the attribute-affirmers turned the tables on the negators. They said to the Muʿtazilites: “When you affirm that Allah is Living, Knowing, and Powerful yet deny that He possesses life, knowledge, and power, you are contradicting yourselves. It is like speaking of something that is black without blackness, white without whiteness, tall without tallness, or beautiful without beauty. A verbal adjective derived from a root necessarily presupposes the reality from which it is derived; to affirm the name of an agent while denying the underlying attribute is, by both reason and revelation, incoherent.”
They said to the philosophers: “If you speak of the existent, the intelligible, the intellect, the knower, the lover, the beloved, the delightful, and the one who delights, and then declare all of these to be one and the same, you are defying reason itself. Should you go further and claim that love is the lover, delight is the thing delighted in, or knowledge is the knower, the contradiction becomes even more glaring. Whoever equates an attribute with the one described by it—or one attribute with another—has abandoned rational thought.”
The affirmers of the textual attributes then asked their opponents: “Why do you deny that Allah is pleased, becomes angry, loves, rejoices, and the like—attributes explicitly stated in the Qur’an and Sunnah?”
They replied, “Because such attributes entail corporeality and anthropomorphism. We can conceive of anger only as the boiling of the heart’s blood in pursuit of vengeance, or as whatever follows from that boiling—and the same holds true for the other emotions.”
They continued, “Likewise, affirming hearing, sight, speech, will, and similar attributes entails assimilation and embodiment, for we know no will except as an inclination in the willing agent toward securing what benefits him and warding off what harms him, or anything inseparable from that sense. A will directed toward something that neither benefits nor harms its possessor is, in our observation, inconceivable. Nonetheless, the Divine will bears no resemblance to the will of created beings.”