Another Stratum

155 – The Jurist Naṣr al-Maqdisī (c. 410–490 AH)

333 – The ascetic imam, Shaykh al-Islam Abū al-Fatḥ Naṣr ibn Ibrāhīm al-Maqdisī al-Shāfiʿī, said in his book al-Ḥujjah—a volume devoted to the Sunnah:

“And Allah, exalted be He, is established over His Throne, distinct from His creation, exactly as He has stated in His Book.”

The jurist Naṣr was the leading scholar of Greater Syria in his day, renowned for both learning and piety. He subsisted on very little, baking a single flatbread by the brazier and breaking his fast with it. He said, “I studied jurisprudence with the jurist Salīm from the year 437 to 440 AH; I copied his notes in three hundred fascicles, and I never wrote a single letter except while in a state of purification.” When the sultan Tutush entered Damascus he visited Naṣr, but the latter did not rise for him. The sultan sent him money from the jizya, yet he returned it. Al-Ghazālī and other distinguished scholars studied under him. He died in 490 AH.

156 – Imām al-Ḥaramayn (418–478 AH)

334 – The imam, “Savant of the East,” Abū al-Maʿālī ʿAbd al-Malik ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Juwaynī al-Shāfiʿī, said in his treatise al-Risālah al-Niẓāmiyyah:

“The scholars have followed different paths regarding these outward texts. Some have chosen to interpret them figuratively and have consistently applied that approach to the verses of the Qur’an and to authentic hadiths. The leading authorities of the early generations, however, refrained from such interpretation, left the texts upon their apparent meanings, and consigned the knowledge of their reality to the Lord—glorified be He. What we judge correct, and what we profess as creed before Allah, is to follow the early generations of the ummah. The decisive textual proof demands this, and the consensus of the ummah is a binding authority. Were the figurative interpretation of these outward texts either permissible or obligatory, their concern for it would surely have exceeded their concern for the subsidiary branches of the sharia,