a day whose measure is a thousand years by your reckoning (5).’ [al-Sajdah: 5]

And His words:

‘The angels and the Spirit ascend to Him.’ [al-Ma‘ārij: 4]

And His words:

‘Do you feel secure that He who is in heaven will not cause the earth to swallow you, whereupon it would quake (16)?’ [al-Mulk: 16]

There are other such verses. If these were subjected to reinterpretation, the entire revealed Law would become subject to reinterpretation. If they were said to be ambiguous, the entire revealed Law would become ambiguous. For all revealed laws are founded on the premise that Allah is in heaven, that the angels descend from it with revelation to the prophets, that the scriptures descended from heaven, and that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, was taken there on his Night Journey, until he drew near the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary.”

He said: “All the philosophers have agreed that Allah and the angels are in heaven, just as [all] revealed laws have agreed on this. The misconception that led the Jahmī negationists to deny direction was their belief that affirming direction necessarily entails affirming place, and that affirming place necessarily entails affirming corporeality.

We say that none of these implications necessarily follows, for direction is not the same as place. Direction refers either to a body’s own enclosing surfaces, which are six in number—it is in this sense that we say an animal has a top and a bottom, a right and a left, a front and a back—or to the surfaces of another body