the Knower of the unseen and the seen, the All-Great, the Exalted” (13:9); and His words, “Glorify the name of your Lord, the Most High” (87:1).

Our Prophet ﷺ has instructed us to say while prostrating, “subḥāna rabbī al-aʿlā (Glory be to my Lord, the Most High).” Allah, Exalted is He, says regarding the martyrs, “Rather, they are alive with their Lord, provided for” (3:169); and the wife of Pharaoh said, “My Lord, build for me, near You, a house in Paradise” (66:11).

71 – Reported by Ahmad 2/435-436, by the two Shaykhs, and by others.

72 – I say: Reflect on this expression, for ignorance of it has driven the masses to deny the profuse proofs from the Book and the Sunnah that affirm His exaltedness above the Throne, and to attack the Salafis who believe in it, claiming that by so believing the Salafis have assigned Allah a location above the Throne. Exalted is Allah far above what the wrongdoers say. Yet here is the author himself—one of their leading imams—openly declaring that Allah is far above dwelling in any place whatsoever. What misleads those multitudes is nothing but their fanciful notion that affirming His exaltedness above His creation necessarily entails that He occupies a place. They say, “That is impossible, and whatever entails an impossibility is itself impossible.” They either ignored or pretended not to know that “place” is a created entity and that above the Throne there is no contingent existence; hence there is, in absolute terms, no “place” there at all. Allah is above His Throne yet is in no place at all.

It is astonishing that those who refuse to believe in His exaltedness above the Throne—in flight from the imagined notion of “place”—have fallen head-first into affirming that Allah is literally in places, by saying, “Allah exists in every place,” or, “Allah exists throughout all existence!” Glorified is Allah, far above what they say.

More astonishing still, some of them, sensing the anthropomorphic likeness that this view casts between Allah and created beings that dwell in places, sought to declare Him transcendent of that—only to fall into something worse: absolute negation, which inevitably denies the very existence of the Exalted altogether. They said:

“Allah is not above, nor below, nor to the right, nor to the left, nor in front, nor behind; He is neither inside the world nor outside it, neither connected to it nor separate from it!”

I have heard this more than once from certain Friday preachers whom the people assume to possess knowledge and piety. To Allah we belong and to Him we return—over the estrangement of the religion and the ignorance of its specialists, let alone the common folk. By Allah, were the most eloquent of mankind asked, “Describe for us non-existence,” he could not go beyond the description they give of their object of worship. One of the imams of the Salaf—perhaps Ibn al-Qayyim—spoke well when he said: “The anthropomorphist worships an idol, while the negator worships nothingness.”