al-Hasan ibn al-Zāghūnī—and countless others—explicitly affirm these attributes while denying corporeality, composition, partition, fragmentation, division, and the like. The first person known to have expressed this position was Abū Muhammad 'Abd Allāh ibn Sa'īd ibn Kullāb. He was then followed in this by multitudes whose number Allah alone knows.

Another group affirms these attributes but neither affirms nor denies composition, corporeality, partition, or similar newly introduced terms. Rather, they declare Allah free of whatever He has declared Himself free of, and say that He is:

“One, the Eternal Refuge; He neither begets nor is born, and there is none comparable to Him.”

Some of them say that it is reported from Ibn 'Abbās and others that He cannot be divided into parts such that one part separates from another. They agree that He cannot be separated or divided, in the sense of one part of Him becoming detached from another. This is the position transmitted from the early generations of the Muslim community and its imams. It is held by the leading jurists, the leading hadith scholars, the leading Sufis, and those among the Hanbalīs devoted exclusively to following the transmitted tradition,