“What do you say about someone who says that Allah is not upon the Throne?” He replied, “All their discourse revolves around disbelief.”

This is what has been preserved from the early generations and the imams concerning the affirmation of a limit for Allah in Himself. Yet they also made clear that His servants can neither delimit Him nor comprehend Him. Thus, their statements on this matter are not contradictory, as some people suppose, for they denied that anyone could delimit Allah, as Hanbal related from him in al-Sunnah wa-l-Mihnah (The Sunnah and the Ordeal).

Al-Khallāl also narrated it in al-Sunnah: ‘Ubayd Allāh ibn Hanbal informed me: My father, Hanbal ibn Ishāq, told me: My uncle said: