He adduced this ḥadīth as proof to the woman who had asked, “Do you fear for yourself?”, thereby confirming her remark—yet, had the heart truly been guarded by two divine favors, there would have been no reason for fear at all.

They also rejected the other report: “He carries the earth on a finger, and such-and-such on a finger, and such-and-such on a finger,” because in this context “finger” can by no means be interpreted as “blessing.”

As for the divine “laughter,” they said it is like the Arabs’ idiom, “The earth laughed with vegetation,” meaning that various blossoms have sprung up; or their saying, “The spathe laughed,” when the palm’s sheath splits open and its white core appears; or, “The cloud laughed,” when lightning flashes within it. Yet every one of these expressions attributes to laughter a newly occurring phenomenon. If the laughter from which they fled would imply a likeness to human beings, then their figurative reading still likens Him to these other created phenomena.

[Refutation of the Anthropomorphists]

When some people observed the excess of those who negate the attributes, they countered with an excess of their own, insisting upon unalloyed anthropomorphism. They spoke of dimensions and limits, took the wording that appears in the ḥadīths at its bare surface meaning, asserted a specific modality for them, and accepted—quite literally—even the most objectionable reports, such as the narration about “sweat …”