just as a sensible man says to an ignorant person who asks about something false and impossible: “I have no answer for you, except that what I know and can answer is such-and-such.”

We have been commanded to believe in Allah’s angels. They are created by Allah Most High, are bounded, and have a particular mode of being. Yet we do not know their distinctive properties or grasp the true nature of their attributes. This does not undermine the soundness of our knowledge that they exist or our belief in them. Knowledge of the spirit and of the intellect’s mode of being has also been concealed from us, although we know that the intellect is the instrument of discernment through which knowledge is apprehended. All these are things created by Allah, mighty and majestic. What, then, would you expect concerning the attributes of the Lord of Might, glorified is He?

“There is nothing like Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing.” (11)
[al-Shūrā 11]

If it is objected: “As for these matters, knowledge of them may be withheld from us because you have found neither sensory evidence of them nor any explanation of their mode of being in a revealed text, nor have you seen any counterpart or likeness to them. But the hand, hearing, sight, and face are known by their names, and counterparts to them exist with their distinctive attributes,” the reply is: “This is an unfair objection and an unjust demand. For the hand, hearing, and sight are bodily organs only in relation to an entity that is a body possessing breadth and depth. Since the mode of being of the entity in which these attributes subsist is known, the same is true of its attributes. But when these