a Muslim. [End of quotation.]

I say: What he has related about Abū al-Husayn and his followers, who are among the distinguished Muʿtazilite scholars, entails that Moses, peace be upon him, asked Allah to see Him with his eyes. Yet they say that a rational person necessarily knows that whatever is seen must be in a direction, and necessarily knows that only a body occupying space can be in a direction. This implies that, according to them, Moses believed that Allah is in a direction and that He is a body.

As for his statement, “This is inadmissible by agreement,” he means agreement between himself and Shaykh Abū al-Husayn. But, by consensus, such an agreement has no probative force.

The third point: That seeing Allah entails His being in a direction relative to the viewer is established by mass-transmitted texts. In the two Sahīh collections and elsewhere, there is the well-known hadith narrated by al-Zuhrī, who said: “We were informed by Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab and ʿAtāʾ ibn Yazīd