views held by Dirār ibn ʿAmr and groups of speculative theologians who professed to support Ahl al-Sunnah on the question of seeing Allah—even though what they affirm is of the same kind as what the Muʿtazilah and the Dirāriyyah denied. Their disagreement with those groups is merely verbal, whereas their disagreement with Ahl al-Sunnah is substantive. For this reason, Bishr al-Marīsī and others like him interpreted the vision of Allah in much the same way as these theologians.

The point here is that some who affirm the vision of Allah denied that the believer experiences bliss through seeing his Lord itself. They argued that there is no affinity between the created and the Eternal, as the scholar Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī stated in his al-Risālah al-Nizāmiyyah, and as Abū al-Wafāʾ ibn ʿAqīl stated in some of his works.