of “meeting” is seeing, the cause being named to denote its effect. The second is that when a man comes before a king and meets him, he comes under the king’s authority and power in a manner he has no means of resisting. That meeting thus occasions the manifestation of the king’s power over him in this way. His power, strength, overwhelming dominion, and fierce might seldom became manifest on that day; that state was described as “meeting.” What demonstrates the soundness of our position is that no one maintains that the essences of created beings meet the essence of the Creator through spatial adjacency. Once interpreting meeting as physical contact or spatial adjacency has been ruled out, nothing remains but what we have mentioned. And Allah knows best.”

The response to this is that the word “meeting” denotes an action entailing movement and drawing near to Allah, Most High. The Quran and Sunnah contain numerous expressions of this kind, such as “coming” in His words, Most High:

“You have certainly come to Us alone, just as We created you the first time, leaving behind you all that We bestowed upon you.”
[Al-Anʿām 94]

And His words:

“You have certainly come to Us just as We created you the first time. Yet you claimed that We would never appoint a time for you.”
[Al-Kahf 48]

And His words:

“Until, when he comes to Us, he says, ‘If only the distance between east and west lay between me and you! What an evil companion!’”
[Al-Zukhruf 38]