contains no binding text that must be followed, he would have spoken well and would thereby have blocked the way for the people of whims to turn the matter into a pretext for assailing the Ahl al-Sunnah and the people of hadith—exactly what al-Kawtharī does in the introduction to his book, Tabyīn Kadhib al-Muftarī fīmā Nusiba ilā al-Imām Abī al-Hasan al-Ashʿarī (p. 64). There, after branding them with the epithet “hashwiyyah,” just as his Jahmite predecessors and others did,¹ he says of them:
“They attribute to Allah what neither the Law nor sound reason allows: affirming for Him movement and transfer (by which he means the descent), limitation and direction (by which he means height), and sitting and being made to sit.”
What concerns us here is the last point—that it is not established.

I say: Had the author ﵀ stopped where we indicated, he would have done well. Instead, he went further and darkened more than a full page with quotations from those who issued fatwas accepting Mujāhid’s report on the explanation of the Almighty’s words, “It may be that your Lord will raise you to a Praiseworthy Station” (17:79)—namely, that He will seat him, or make him sit, upon the Throne. Some of them even said, “I denounce anyone who rejects this hadith; to me he is a vile, suspect man.” He also related that Imām Aḥmad said, “The scholars have received this report with acceptance,” along with other remarks you may read in the original; there is no need for us to reproduce them all in this introduction.

In his abridgment entitled al-Dhahabiyyah he lists a further group of hadith scholars who accepted this report and offers no critique there. Here, however, his stance is extremely inconsistent: for while at the end of the biography of Muḥammad ibn Muṣʿab al-ʿĀbid, after citing one of those very statements (p. 126), he writes,
“Observe—may Allah protect you from caprice—how the thinking of this hadith scholar led him to deem obligatory the adoption of a rejected report…,”
if you ponder this remark you would think that he rejects the report outright and does not believe it, that such rejection is incumbent upon him and that he would not hesitate. Yet you will be startled to find him on p. 143, after