16 – Muhammad ibn Hamzah ibn Abi al-Saqr reported to us; Abu l-Hasan ʿAli ibn Ahmad ibn Mansur ibn Qubays al-Ghassani informed us; he said: My father informed me; he said: Abu ʿUthman Ismaʿil ibn ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Sabuni said:

The people of hadith who hold fast to the Book and the sunnah know their Lord—glorified be He—through the attributes He Himself has proclaimed in His Book and revelation, and to which His Messenger has borne witness, just as they have come in the sound reports transmitted by upright, trustworthy narrators. They do not believe that His attributes resemble the attributes of His creation, nor do they seek to determine how, in the manner of the anthropomorphists. They do not distort the words from their proper contexts, as the Muʿtazilah and the Jahmiyyah have done. Allah has safeguarded the People of the Sunnah from both distortion and speculative modality, and has favored them with understanding and clear knowledge, so that they have walked the path of pure monotheism and transcendence, abandoned the doctrines of negation and anthropomorphism, and followed His saying: “Nothing is like unto Him, and He is the Hearing, the Seeing” (Q 42:11).