Ahmad ibn Hanbal the matter of the Jahmiyyah and what they were saying. He replied, “Their words are the words of heretics. They revolve around negation; they affirm nothing. Such is the way of heretics.”

Al-Maymūnī added, “Abū ‘Abd Allāh said to me, ‘I have heard that they make a claim which they themselves abandon, and raise objections concerning place. They say, “He is all things, but not a thing within a thing.”’ He said to me, ‘He has thus abandoned his earlier position,’ and began expressing his astonishment to me.”

It is also reported that Ahmad ibn Hanbal said, “No one is more harmful to Islam than the Jahmiyyah. They seek only to invalidate the Quran and the hadiths of Allah’s Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.”

Such statements abound in the words of the early generations, the imams, and the other scholars; only Allah can count them. In these statements, they characterize the Jahmiyyah as guilty of heretical unbelief—which is hypocrisy—of negation, and of rejecting the Quran and hadith. They also state that they profess Islam and acknowledge the Quran only outwardly, for fear of the sword.

If this is so, and they were the first to introduce into Islam the claim that Allah, Exalted is He, is not a body, and that if He is not a body, this necessarily entails denying His being above the Throne, denying His attributes, and so forth, then it is clear that the hypocrisy, dissimulation, and fear of the believers’ swords found among these people are greater than what those others have mentioned.