, knowledge, power, will, speech, hearing, and sight. They deny all other attributes. Some add only ‘the hand’ to these; others suspend judgment on denying the remaining attributes, while their extremists categorically deny them.

As for the ‘Muʿtazilah’, they deny the attributes altogether while affirming the corresponding predicates. For most of them, these amount to His being All-Knowing and All-Powerful. As for His having will and speech, they regard these as attributes that arise in time, express relations, or consist in negations. They are the closest of all people to the ‘Sabian philosophers’ among the Romans and those Arabs and Persians who followed their path, who claimed that all attributes amount to a negation, a relation, or a combination of negation and relation. All these people are misguided and reject the messengers. Whoever Allah has granted knowledge of what the messengers brought and penetrating insight, and who understands the true basis of these people’s views, knows with certainty that they deviate from the truth concerning His names and signs, and that they have rejected the messengers, the Scripture, and that with which His messengers were sent.

Hence they used to say: ‘Religious innovations spring from unbelief and lead back to it.’ They would also say: ‘The Muʿtazilah are the effeminate counterparts of the philosophers, and the Ashʿarīs are the effeminate counterparts of the Muʿtazilah.’

Yahyā ibn ʿAmmār used to say: ‘The Muʿtazilah are the male Jahmiyyah, and the Ashʿarīs are the female Jahmiyyah.’ They meant those Ashʿarīs who deny the attributes known through revelation. As for any of them who adheres to the book al-Ibānah, which al-Ashʿarī composed toward the end of his life, and has not openly expressed a position contradicting it, such a person is counted among Ahl al-Sunnah. Nevertheless, identifying oneself by affiliation with al-Ashʿarī is itself a religious innovation