and ʿAbbās ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīm al-ʿAnbarī, Harb ibn Ismāʿīl al-Kirmānī, and countless other leading scholars and men of religion; and his students’ students who compiled his statements and reports about him, such as ʿAbd al-Rahmān ibn Abī Hātim, Abū Bakr al-Khallāl, Abū al-Hasan al-Banānī al-Asbahānī, and others like them. These also include those who followed him and other such imams in matters of doctrine and practical rulings, such as Abū ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī, the author of al-Jāmiʿ, Abū ʿAbd al-Rahmān al-Nasāʾī, and others like them, as well as Abū Muhammad ibn Qutaybah and his peers. A detailed discussion of this belongs elsewhere.

In al-Masāʾil al-Tabaristāniyyah and al-Kīlāniyyah, we have given a detailed account of people’s positions and how they branched out and diverged on this fundamental issue. The point here is that many later scholars did not understand the true meaning of the statements of the early generations and the imams. Some revere them and claim to follow them, while unknowingly opposing them. Others suppose that they did not understand the fundamentals of religion or know how to establish them through demonstrative proofs. This is due to their ignorance of those scholars’ knowledge—indeed, their ignorance of the truth brought by the Messenger, which is supported by rational evidence as well as revelation.

Thus, many later scholars share a false premise, from which each group derives false conclusions to which it commits itself. This is exemplified by their explicit statements concerning Allah Most High’s speaking the Arabic Quran and the Hebrew Torah, and the letters of the alphabet contained in them, whether combined or separate: when they saw that this extended to the attributes of created beings, it became confused with the attributes of created beings, and so they failed to discern the proper basis for