entails that He is confined to a spatial locus or a particular direction, for whatever is beneath the Throne is described in terms of space and directions, whereas what lies above it is not so described. Allah is above His Throne, as the earliest generations unanimously affirmed and as the leading imams transmitted from them. They stated this while refuting the Jahmiyyah, who claimed that He is in every place, using as their proof-text, “and He is with you.” Thus, these two opinions were the ones current in the time of the Tābiʿūn and their followers, and both are, in general, intelligible positions.
As for the third view, which appeared only later1—namely, that the Exalted is not in places, nor outside them; not above His Throne; neither connected with creation nor separate from it; that His sanctified Essence is neither spatially confined2 nor distinct from His creatures; that He is neither in directions nor outside directions, and so on—this is something utterly inconceivable and unintelligible, and it clashes with the Qur’ānic verses and the prophetic reports. So flee with your religion! Beware of the doctrines of the dialectical theologians. Believe in Allah and in what has come from Allah as He intended it, entrust your affair to Allah, and realise that there is no power and no strength except through Allah.
The book is now complete; all praise belongs to Allah alone. May abundant blessings and peace be upon our master Muhammad, his family, and his Companions. Allah is sufficient for us and He is the best disposer of affairs.
315 – I say: Indeed, such a notion is grasped only by those who espouse the doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd (unity of existence), who claim that Creator and creation are one and the same—indeed that there is nothing that can be called creator or creature, for everything you see with your eyes is Allah! Exalted is Allah far above what the wrongdoers say. It is quite possible that Jahm and others of the early propagandists, by asserting that Allah is in every place and not upon the Throne, were seeking to plant the creed of waḥdat al-wujūd, which necessarily negates the very existence of the Creator, may He be glorified. They did so, however, in a sly and covert manner; hence the Salaf issued a fierce denunciation of him and his followers. Some of them—even as recorded earlier in the biography of Imām Ibn al-Mubārak and others—stated explicitly that the Jahmiyyah allege that Allah is nothing at all! What would the righteous predecessors say if they could hear today’s extremist Sufis proclaiming from their pulpits: “Allah is not above, nor below, nor to the right, nor to the left, nor in front, nor behind, neither within the universe nor outside it”!