As for the Jahmiyyah, including the Muʿtazilah and others, meeting Allah is impossible according to their principles, since they hold that Allah cannot be seen either in this world or in the Hereafter. In this they contradict both the mass-transmitted reports from the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and the consensus of the Companions and the leading scholars of Islam that the believers will see their Lord in the Hereafter. They have advanced numerous rational and scriptural arguments whose invalidity we have explained at length, and we have set out the evidence from reason and revelation establishing the possibility of seeing Him.

This “issue” is one of the fundamentals concerning which the early generations and leading scholars sternly condemned those who disagreed, and on which they wrote well-known works.

Second: in their view, it is inconceivable that a servant should strive towards Him, be presented before Him, stand before Him, love Him, find Him, point to Him, return to Him, or turn back to Him. For these expressions imply that the servant’s condition in relation to Him in the Hereafter—with a distinction between the two—entails drawing closer to Him and coming near Him, and that the servant’s condition in relation to Him differs from his condition in this world. All of this is impossible in their view, for they do not acknowledge that the Creator is separate from creation—as the early generations and leading scholars unanimously affirmed, explicitly stating that He is separate from creation: He is not within created things, nor are created things within Him.

Rather, at times they maintain that His very essence dwells in every place; at times they identify His existence with the very existence of created things; and at times they describe Him in purely negative terms, such as being neither separate from the world nor dwelling within it. Thus they fall between