of that: the re-interpretation and distortion of the attributes, the attitude of simply passing them by and suspending judgment, or the stance of affirming them without figurative exegesis, without denial, and without likening or anthropomorphism. Yet whenever I looked to the texts in the Book of Allah, exalted is He, and in the Sunnah of His Messenger ﷺ, I found them plainly proclaiming the realities of these attributes, just as they plainly affirm loftiness and transcendence, and just as they affirm the letter and the sound.

Then I would see that the later theologians, in their works, had some of them interpreting istiwāʾ as subjugation and dominion, interpreting the descent as the descent of His command, interpreting the two hands as two powers or two favors, interpreting the foot as “a footing of truth with their Lord,” and the like. At the same time they would maintain that the speech of Allah is a meaning subsisting in His essence, devoid of letters and sound, and that these letters are merely an expression of that subsisting meaning!

Among those who espoused these views, or part of them, were people who hold a special place in my heart—such as a number of the Ashʿarī jurists of the Shāfiʿī school—for it was through the school of al-Shāfiʿī, may Allah have mercy on him, that I came to know the obligations and rulings of my religion. I thus found these venerable shaykhs inclining to such opinions; they were my teachers, and I harbored complete respect for them on account of their virtue and knowledge. Even so, I felt within myself an uneasiness toward these figurative interpretations; my heart could not rest with them. I sensed from them turbidity and darkness; they constricted my breast and denied it any openness. I was like a bewildered man, tossed about in his confusion, writhing as his heart turned this way and that.

I used to fear openly affirming loftiness, istiwāʾ, and descent, lest that entail confinement or anthropomorphism. Yet whenever I examined the texts in the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger ﷺ, I found them pointing unmistakably to the real meanings of these matters; I found the Messenger of Allah ﷺ explicitly conveying them, describing his Lord thereby. And I know—by necessity—that in his noble assembly sat the learned and the ignorant, the quick-witted and the dull, the Bedouin and the rough-hewn, yet I find nothing that follows those texts in which he described his Lord—no statement and no apparent indication—that would divert them from their real sense and reinterpret them, as these theologian-jurists, my own teachers, have done when they read istiwāʾ as dominion, descent as the descent of His command, and so forth. And I did not