and many of the philosophers and the Bātiniyyah. These people say that affirming the attributes entails His being a body; yet He is not a body, so no attributes can be affirmed of Him.

They say: “For attributes, as we can conceive them, are accidents inhering in a body, and an attribute of His cannot be conceived otherwise.”

They say: “Seeing can only be conceived as direct visual observation. Such observation is possible only if what is seen is in a direction, and only a body can be in a direction.”

They say: “Moreover, if speech or anything else inhered in Him, this would necessarily mean that He is a body. Thus, the speech attributed to Him can only be something created and separate from Him.”

These were among the arguments they used in debating Imam Ahmad during the “Inquisition.” Among those who argued that the Quran was created on the grounds of rejecting corporeality was Abū ‘Īsā Muhammad ibn ‘Īsā Burghūth, a pupil of Husayn al-Najjār. He was one of the foremost speculative theologians. Ibn Abī Du’ād had assembled to debate Imam Ahmad as many speculative theologians from Basra, Baghdad, and elsewhere as he could who maintained that the Quran was created.

This position was not exclusive to the Mu‘tazilah, as some people suppose. Many—or indeed most—of those speculative theologians were not Mu‘tazilah. Bishr al-Marīsī was not one of the Mu‘tazilah either. Rather, they included Najjāriyyah, among them Burghūth, and Dirāriyyah. Hafs al-Fard, who debated al-Shāfi‘ī, belonged to the Dirāriyyah, the followers of Dirār ibn ‘Amr. They also included Murji’ah, among them Bishr al-Marīsī. Some were purely Jahmiyyah, and some were Mu‘tazilah. And Ibn Abī