affirm hearing and sight for Allah, we have likened Him to His creation!’

This is precisely what the Muʿtazilah actually did: they reinterpreted the two attributes as merely meaning “knowledge,” claiming thereby to declare Him transcendent above any resemblance. In doing so they believed in the first half of the verse—“There is nothing like unto Him”—but not in the second half—“and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing.”

The Ashʿarites and other later theologians, on the other hand, accepted both halves, combining transcendence and affirmation by saying, “His hearing is unlike our hearing, and His sight is unlike our sight.” This is correct, and they should have applied the same principle to every attribute that Allah has ascribed to Himself. One should therefore say: His coming is real, yet it is not like our coming; His descending to the lowest heaven is real—as the mutawātir hadiths will show later in the book—yet it is not like our descent; and so it is with every attribute. Regrettably, they did not do this for many of the attributes. Among them is the one under discussion, which they reinterpreted as mentioned above—or in some other manner,¹—and among them is the istiwāʾ that will be discussed shortly.

This is the first example.

The second example is His saying, “Indeed, your Lord is Allah who created the heavens and the earth in six days, then established Himself above the Throne” (7:54), and His saying, “Allah is the One who raised the heavens without pillars that you see, then established Himself above the Throne” (13:2). The later theologians reinterpreted the istiwāʾ in these and similar verses as “dominion,” and to justify this they routinely cite the poet’s lines:
“Bishr has ascended to authority over Iraq
without sword and without blood being shed!”

They disregard the unanimous statements of the leading authorities in exegesis, hadith, and language, all of whom rejected this interpretation and held that istiwāʾ over the Throne means elevation and rising above it—as you will see their words transmitted in this book with sound chains of narration, generation after generation. Among those who recorded the scholarly consensus on this are Imām Isḥāq ibn Rāhwayh (biography 67) and the ḥadith master Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (biography 151), and their testimony alone suffices as proof in this matter.

Yet we still find the later scholars—save for a few of them—persisting in