Al-Ṭalḥī al-Isfahānī, author of al-Targhīb wa’l-Tarhīb,(1) was asked about the Lord’s attributes and replied:

“The doctrine of Mālik, al-Thawrī, al-Awzāʿī, al-Shāfiʿī, Ḥammād ibn Salama, Ḥammād ibn Zayd, Aḥmad, Yaḥyā ibn Saʿīd al-Qaṭṭān, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Mahdī, and Isḥāq ibn Rāhawayh is that the attributes with which God has described Himself and with which His Messenger has described Him—hearing, sight, face, the two hands, and all His other attributes—are to be affirmed in their plain, well-known sense, without imagining a “how,” without likening them to creation, and without allegorical reinterpretation. Ibn ʿUyaynah said: ‘Every description by which God has described Himself—its very recitation is its exposition.’ He then added: ‘That is, it is to be left upon its outward sense; it is impermissible to divert it to figurative language by any form of taʾwīl.’”

The ḥāfiẓ of his age, Abū al-Qāsim, died in 535 AH.

164 – Ibn Mūhib ( ? – ? )

346 – The scholar Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Mūhib al-Mālikī said, in his commentary on the Epistle of Imām Abū Muḥammad ibn Abī Zayd:

“As for his statement, ‘He is above His Glorious Throne in His very essence,’ the words fawqa (above) and ʿalā (upon) have the same meaning among all Arabs. The Book and the sunnah confirm this, as in His saying, ‘Then He rose over the Throne’ (7:54), and His saying, ‘The Most Compassionate rose over the Throne’ (20:5), and His saying, ‘They fear their Lord above them’ (16:50).

“He then cited the ḥadith of the slave-girl and the account of the Ascension up to the Lote-Tree of the furthest boundary, and went on to say:

“The preposition fī may, in Arabic, carry the sense of ‘above,’ as in His words, ‘Walk on (fī) its shoulders’ (67:15), ‘in (fī) the trunks of the palm-trees’ (26:148), and, ‘Do you feel secure from Him who is in (fī) the heaven?’ (67:16). The exegetes(2) said: He means ‘above it,’ and this was also the view of Mālik, taken from what he had learnt from those Successors he had met …”