His creation and His proximity (‘adnāhum) are one and the same; nothing is far from Him. End of Al-Radd ʿalā al-Juhmiyyah, pp. 17–18. Our esteemed teacher Dr. Muḥammad Khalīl Harrās comments: “This hadith gleams with clarity and lucidity; it is a thunderbolt against the heads of those who negate God’s attributes (the Juhmiyyah). A man had wronged his slave-girl by striking her and sought to atone for his sin by freeing her. The Prophet ﷺ granted him a delay in order to test her faith. The question chosen for this trial was ‘Where is Allāh?’ When she answered, ‘In the heaven,’ he accepted her reply and attested to her faith. Were you to ask an atheist, ‘Where is Allāh?’ he would be judged an unbeliever. See: Ḥashīyat al-Tawḥīd by Ibn Khuzaymah, p. 121.” Anyone among the innovators who denies the propriety of asking about Allāh with bi-ayna (where) thereby denies the Messenger ﷺ and accuses him of a grave error. This, as you see, is extreme misguidance and a clear, explicit slander against the infallibility (ʿiṣmah) of the Messenger ﷺ and his message. Some of the innovators have tried to discredit this hadith by alleging textual variation (ikhtilāf), as al-Kawtharī did when commenting on it in al-Bayhaqī’s al-Asmāʼ wa al-Ṣifāt. But this attack is baseless, manifestly unfair, and slanderous. In response to this false claim, Shaykh Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī stated: “This hadith is sound beyond doubt. Only an ignorant or ill-intentioned person—driven by personal whims—would, when faced with a text from the Messenger ﷺ that contradicts their falsehood, attempt to neutralize it by interpretation or even nullify it. Failing that, they attack its authenticity, as with this hadith. Its chain of transmission is sound and unanimously affirmed by the hadith masters—most notably Imam Muslim, who included it in his Ṣaḥīḥ, as did Abū ʿAwānah in his extraction (‘alayhi) and al-Bayhaqī in al-Asmāʼ, where he records it with a following note (p. 422). This is indeed a sound hadith found in Muslim. Yet the doomed al-Kawtharī, in his fanaticism, attempts to sow doubt by claiming its variation. He commented on it in his annotations to al-Asmāʼ (pp. 441–442): ‘ʿAṭā’ ibn Yasar alone related the report from Muʿāwiyah ibn al-Ḥakam, and there occurs in its wording—as in al-Dhahabī’s Kitāb al-ʿUlūw—an indication that the Prophet ﷺ addressed the maid only by gesture. The narrator then formulated a phrasing based on what he understood of that gesture. The wording of ʿAṭā’ supporting this is: “The owner of the maid narrated it to me himself,” in which it states: “The Prophet ﷺ stretched out his hand, questioning, ‘Who is in the heaven?’ She said, ‘Allāh.’ He asked, ‘And who am I?’ She said, ‘The Messenger of Allāh.’ He said, ‘Free her, for she is a Muslim.’” This, he claims, proves that “Where is Allāh?” was never verbally uttered by the Prophet ﷺ (!) and that the narration merely conveyed the meaning.’