authenticity has been established through the soundness of their chains of transmission and the integrity of their transmitters. For some hadith scholars have seized upon expressions in these reports that are not supported by sound chains of transmission, occurring only in isolated and anomalous reports. They have made them a basis in matters of the divine attributes and treated them as belonging to that category. An example is the hadith of intercession and the wording reported therein: ‘Then I return to my Lord and find Him at His place,’ or ‘in His place.’ On this understanding, they claimed that Allah has a place—exalted is Allah above that!

This wording, however, was transmitted in this account solely by Sharīk ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Abī Namir. His fellow narrators differed from him and did not corroborate it. An addition of this kind should be rejected, not accepted, because it conveys an impossibility, and because a narrator’s fellow transmitters contradicting his account is like one body of evidence contradicting another: when the two conflict, both are invalidated.

Were this wording authentic, it might also mean that he finds his Lord as He was before with regard to His response concerning