The reply is: Know that although his discussion in this section contains its share of mingling truth with falsehood, it is nevertheless the closest to the truth of all that he has put forward. This is because he understood “self” to mean His essence, and this is correct.

Some later scholars who affirmed the divine attributes considered “self” in these texts to be an attribute of Allah additional to His essence, because they had heard that earlier scholars included it in their discussion of the attributes. Yet this was not what the earlier scholars intended; their aim was simply to refute those of the Jahmiyyah who denied it. Those later scholars claimed that their interpretation was the apparent meaning of the texts, but that is not so.

The imams of the Sunnah expressly stated that “self” means His essence, and all their statements accord with this, as can be seen in Imam Ahmad’s refutation of the Jahmiyyah. He said:

“Then the Jahmī advanced another claim, saying, ‘Tell us about the Quran: is it a thing?’ We replied, ‘Yes, it is a thing.’ He said, ‘Allah is the Creator of all things. Why, then, should the Quran not be among the created things, when you have acknowledged that it is a thing?’ By my life, he had indeed advanced a claim that gave him scope to argue, and sowed confusion among