also:

Ahl al-Sunnah said concerning Allah’s words,

“The Most Merciful rose over the Throne,”

that Allah’s rising over His glorious Throne is real, not metaphorical.

Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Qurtubī, author of the well-known Quran commentary, said concerning the Most High’s words,

“Then He rose over the Throne”:

Scholars have discussed this “question of rising over the Throne” and devoted treatises to it. We have explained their views in our book “Al-Asnā: An Explanation of Allah’s Most Beautiful Names,” mentioning fourteen positions on the matter.

Later, he said:

The earliest generations—may Allah be pleased with them—did not maintain that direction should be denied, nor did they express such a denial. Rather, they and everyone else explicitly affirmed it for Allah Most High, as His Book declares and His messengers reported.

He said:

None of the righteous early generations denied that He truly rose over His Throne. The Throne was singled out because it is the greatest of His creations. What they did not know was only the manner of His rising over it, for its actual nature is unknown. As Mālik said, “Rising over the Throne is known”—meaning in the language—while its manner is unknown, and asking about this is an innovation. Umm Salamah—may Allah be pleased with her—said likewise.

This shaykh, renowned in Egypt and elsewhere, said in his book “An Explanation of the Names”:

Imam Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Hadramī al-Qayrawānī, who wrote the epistle he entitled “The Epistle on the Names up to the Question of Rising over the Throne,” mentioned, when discussing the disagreement among later scholars concerning rising over the Throne, the view of “al-Tabarī—that is, Abū Ja‘far, author of the extensive Quran commentary—and Abū Muhammad ibn Abī Zayd, Qādī ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, and a number of leading scholars of hadith and jurisprudence. He said: This is the apparent sense of some of the books of Qādī Abū Bakr,” and of Abū al-Hasan—that is,