to Moses, peace be upon him:

“Indeed, I am Allah. There is no deity except Me, so worship Me and establish prayer for My remembrance.”

And He said:

“I am Allah, Lord of all worlds.”

It is clear that if Allah commanded an angel to call out every night, or to call out to Moses, the angel would not say:

“Who will call upon Me, that I may answer him? Who will ask of Me, that I may give him? Who will seek My forgiveness, that I may forgive him?”

Nor would he say:

“I ask no one other than Myself about My servants.”

As for the objection that night begins earlier or later and varies in length according to the land and the season, the response is this: The answer is the same as the answer to your question, “Does the Throne become vacant of Him, or not?” If it is possible for Him to descend without the Throne becoming vacant of Him, the same applies to His descent occurring earlier or later and lasting longer or shorter, since this descent cannot be measured against the descent of created beings.

In sum, questions of this kind may be answered in several ways.

(First: to show that the disputant who denies this is committed to implications even further removed from what he himself acknowledges to be rational than those entailed by the position of one who affirms it. If the rational argument invoked is sound, the denial must be false, and affirmation must therefore follow, since the truth cannot lie outside two contradictory propositions. If the argument is invalid, it does not invalidate affirmation and thus cannot counter what is established by innate reason and the prophetic law.

An example is someone saying, “If He were above the Throne, He would be a body, and that is impossible.”

He is told: There are three positions on this matter: