covered by this verse, denied that anyone could know its meaning, or treated Allah’s names and attributes as unintelligible foreign speech. Nor did they say that Allah sends down speech whose meaning no one understands. Rather, their statements had sound meanings.

Concerning the hadiths about the divine attributes, they said: “Let them stand as transmitted.” They forbade, rejected, and refuted the reinterpretations of the Jahmiyyah, which strip the texts of the meanings they convey. The statements of Ahmad and the imams before him clearly show that they rejected the Jahmiyyah’s reinterpretations, affirmed the texts according to the meanings they convey, and understood some of what they indicate, just as they understood the other texts concerning promises, warnings, merits, and other matters.

Ahmad also said, “Let them stand as transmitted,” concerning hadiths other than those about the divine attributes, including hadiths containing warnings, such as the Prophet’s saying:

“Whoever cheats us is not one of us.”

He also said this concerning hadiths about merits. What he meant was that the wording of a hadith must not be distorted from its proper sense, as is done by those who distort it and whose distortion is called “interpretation” in later terminology. Thus, what these later figures call interpretation is, in the imams’ judgment, false distortion.

Likewise, Ahmad explicitly stated in his book Refutation of the Heretics and the Jahmiyyah that they clung to the ambiguous passages of the Quran. Ahmad discussed those ambiguous passages and explained their meaning and interpretation in a manner contrary to the Jahmiyyah’s reinterpretation, following the path of the imams before him. This establishes the imams’ agreement that they know the meaning of these ambiguous passages and that their explanation and interpretation must not be withheld. Rather, by the imams’ agreement, they are to be explained and interpreted without distorting them from their proper sense or deviating concerning Allah’s names and verses.