Moreover, it is well known that he, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, condemned the People of the Book for what they had distorted and altered. It is also well known that the Torah is filled with references to the divine attributes. Had these been among the things altered and distorted, they would have deserved even greater condemnation for that. Yet when they mentioned the attributes in his presence, he would laugh in amazement at them and in affirmation of those attributes. He never reproached them with the accusations that those who deny the attributes level against those who affirm them, such as corporealism, likening Allah to His creation, and the like.

Rather, he reproached them for saying:

“Allah’s hand is fettered,”

and:

“Allah is poor, while we are rich,”

and for saying that He rested after creating the heavens and the earth. Allah Most High therefore said:

“We certainly created the heavens and the earth and everything between them in six days, and no weariness touched Us.”

The Torah is filled with attributes corresponding to those mentioned in the Quran and hadith, yet it contains no explicit affirmation of resurrection comparable to that in the Quran. If it were permissible to reinterpret the attributes affirmed by both scriptures, then reinterpreting resurrection, which only one of them explicitly affirms, would be even more warranted. Yet it is necessarily known from the Messenger’s religion that the latter is false; the former is therefore even more clearly false.

As for the third group—those who attribute ignorance—they include many who profess adherence to the Sunnah and claim to follow the early generations. They say that the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, did not know the meanings of the verses concerning the attributes that Allah revealed to him; that Gabriel did not know their meanings either; and that the earliest forerunners in faith did not know them.

They likewise say of the hadiths concerning the attributes that Allah alone knows their meaning, even though the Messenger himself initially uttered them. According to their view, then, he spoke words whose meaning he did not know.