the roundness of the celestial spheres, even though this Abū Muhammad was among the most learned of men: he did not follow others uncritically and cited as evidence only what he had established as authentic. But this is not the place for that discussion.

In opposition to that, these people cite hadith reports that specialists regard as the sort of absurd, unsound reasoning used by the Jahmī advocates of analogy. One example is the historian Abū al-Qāsim’s appeal, in a dictation on divine transcendence, to a hadith he related through a chain of transmission from Awsajah. And this