and sincere devotion to Him, as the foremost scholars of the early generations explained it.

Allah Most High says:

“Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their chastity. That is purer for them.”

He also says:

“Take charity from their wealth to purify and cleanse them thereby.”

All this has been discussed at length elsewhere.

The point here is that whoever denies imperfections of Allah—such as death, ignorance, inability, deafness, blindness and muteness—without affirming attributes that have real existence, such as life, knowledge, power, hearing, sight and speech, but instead claims that His attributes are purely negative and that He cannot be described by anything positively existent, has established no attribute of perfection for Him whatsoever, let alone any basis for asking which of two attributes is superior. Comparing two things in excellence presupposes that each possesses some perfection; only then can one consider which is more perfect. If, however, both are assumed to be pure nonexistence, there is neither perfection nor excellence there at all.

The same applies to someone who affirms His names but not His attributes, saying, “He is Living, All-Knowing, All-Powerful, All-Hearing, All-Seeing, Almighty and All-Wise—but these names do not entail that He possesses life, knowledge, power, hearing, sight, might or wisdom.”

If he is then asked, “Which of the two names is superior?” he cannot give a sound answer. For if he says, for example, “The All-Knowing is greater than the All-Hearing because its scope is universal,” or, “The Almighty is more perfect than the All-Powerful because it necessarily entails power, whereas the reverse does not hold,” he would be told: “If, in your view, the names have no