such distance and so many barriers that, were he to mean the actual hand, he would be lying.

For this reason, if the other person’s actual hand were with him—for instance, if they were holding one another beneath a garment, or were positioned so that one could put his hand inside the other’s garment—and he then said, “So-and-so has a hand with me,” the statement could not be understood as referring to anything [other] than the actual hand. This is because the circumstances would have nullified the contextual indicator’s effect. In established usage, an unqualified expression points to the literal meaning even more directly than the circumstances do. Although a contextual indicator may permit figurative usage, if that indicator is [inoperative] in the face of the circumstances, then it is all the more fitting that it should be so when the expression is unqualified.

Likewise, using “hand” to mean power requires a contextual indicator, as when someone says, “So-and-so has a hand over me.” The expression “over me” is an indicator that “hand” means power. Here too, however, that indicator is inoperative in the face of the circumstances, as we explained above concerning blessing. This is clear and evident.

There is another proof: if we consider what is meant by His saying, Most High,

“What prevented you from prostrating to what I created with My two hands?” [Sād: 75],

it cannot mean blessing or power. For Allah, Most High, intended to establish Adam’s superiority over Iblīs, when Iblīs boasted of the substance from which he was created—fire—and claimed that it made him superior to dust and clay. Allah therefore refuted his boast and affirmed for Adam a degree of distinction