and deny its necessary concomitants. Their hypocrisy concerns faith in Allah and the Messenger: they outwardly profess belief in the Quran and in the names and attributes of Allah mentioned in it, which are among His signs, yet in reality they do not believe in them. Rather, in much of this they are hypocrites, distorting words from their proper meanings and deviating concerning Allah’s names and attributes.

This is compounded by their hypocrisy in rational matters: they seek to follow reason, yet they are among those most extreme in denying rational truths. Their sophistry in rational matters, and their Qarmatianism and hypocrisy in religious matters, are too extensive to set out fully here. By the consensus of the Muslims, this is among the basest and most untenable approaches in both reason and religion.

As for the dissimulation al-Rāzī reports of his opponents, at most they practised dissimulation in dealing with someone who says that Allah is not a body. At most, this would mean that he was right and they were wrong, for his statement has not been transmitted from Allah, His Messenger, or any of the early generations of the Muslim community or its leading scholars. None of them denied what these people deny under the heading of “body” and its necessary concomitants, nor did they deny what these people call “composition,” “division,” and “combination.” And if these concepts are nowhere negated with regard to Allah—whether in their terminology or in any other wording—in the speech of Allah