and follows it has disbelieved, just as the early generations and the leading scholars declared them unbelievers.

The fifth point: These verses are advanced as counterevidence only by the Jahmiyyah who say that He is everywhere, as the leading scholars have stated. Yet many of these people engage in obfuscation, as this founder has done: they affirm neither what those verses entail nor what these entail. They cite these merely to give the appearance of refuting what those verses indicate, even though, on their own view, these do not refute it, as we have explained.

If these Jahmiyyah say that He is everywhere in His essence, they incur even more of the untenable consequences and contradictions they sought to escape by adopting this view instead of affirming that He is above the Throne. That being so, they have no rational proof to justify reinterpreting those verses rather than these. Their appeal to these verses is therefore invalid, just like that of their brethren. Thus, both groups’ use of these verses as counterevidence is shown to be unsound.

For if someone advancing these verses as counterevidence says that He is everywhere, such that He is in contact with bodies and bounded by them, or says that He is both within the world and outside it and is a bounded body, these positions contain errors not found in the position of someone who says that He is above the Throne and is a body, as explained earlier.

That being so, he cannot, as previously explained, maintain his claim about what these verses entail on the grounds that rational proof supports these rather than those. Rather, rational proofs support those verses more clearly than they support these, as