Then, when these affirmers say to those who affirm that He is pleased, becomes angry, loves, and hates—or who describe Him as rising above, descending, coming, and arriving, or as having a face, a hand, and the like—“This entails corporealism, because we know of nothing described in this way except a body,” those who affirm these attributes reply:

“Yet you yourselves have described Him as possessing life, knowledge, power, hearing, sight, and speech, and the same reasoning applies to these. If only a body can be described by these attributes, the same holds for the others. If something that is not a body can be described by one set of attributes, the same holds for the other. To distinguish between them is therefore to distinguish between equivalent cases.”

Thus, since this method of refuting those who ascribe deficiencies to Allah Most High is unsound, none of the early generations or imams adopted it. None of them spoke of Allah in terms of a body, whether to deny or affirm it, nor in terms of substance, spatial location, or the like. These are ambiguous expressions that neither establish any truth nor refute any falsehood. Accordingly, nothing of this kind appears among the things Allah condemned in the Jews and other disbelievers in His Book. Rather, this belongs to the innovated discourse that the early generations and imams condemned.