and: “He is not to be described except with what He has described Himself, or what His Prophet has described Him with; these are real attributes, not mere figures of speech.”

I remark: He might equally well have left out the words “real attribute,” for once we affirm the Creator’s qualities and say, “We let them pass as they have come,” we have already believed that they are attributes. To add, after that, “a real attribute, not figurative,” is clumsy, foreign-sounding language that weighs on the listener—so let it be dropped. This phrase has indeed been transmitted from a number of scholars, and what they meant by it was simply that these attributes are accepted without distortion or interpretation, unlike the way figurative expressions are treated. Allah knows best.

Allah has spared us the need for invented terminology, for the textual evidences concerning the attributes are plain. Were those attributes to be reduced to metaphor, they would cease to be attributes of God altogether. An attribute follows the One described: He exists in reality, not metaphorically, and so His attributes are likewise not metaphorical. Since nothing resembles Him, it follows that none of His attributes resemble anything else.

Imām Abū Aḥmad became known as “al-Qaṣṣāb” (“the Butcher”) because of the many unbelievers he killed in battle. He was among the leading hadith scholars around the year 400 AH.

297- He is the ḥāfiẓ, the eminent scholar, Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Mujāhid. He was called “al-Qaṣṣāb” because of the amount of unbelievers’ blood he shed during the expeditions, as recorded in the author’s Tadhkira (3/141), where it is also said: “I have not discovered the year of his death; it seems he lived until shortly before 360 AH.”

The nisbah appears in all the manuscripts as “al-Kirgī,” with a jīm. In the printed Tadhkira it reads “al-Karkhī,” with a khāʾ, which I take to be a typographical error, for a few lines later it quotes Abū al-Ḥasan al-Kirgī saying:

In noble Kirj, the paragon of his time,
Abū Aḥmad al-Qaṣṣāb stands unconquered.

“al-Kirj,” with a fatḥah on the first consonant and a pronounced r, is a town situated between Isfahan and Hamadan. “al-Kurj,” with a ḍammah on the first consonant and the r silent, denotes a Christian people living in part of the Roman sector of Azerbaijan.

It is curious that the biographer did not mention either of these two localities in his works on genealogies, geography, or ambiguous names. Allah knows best.