This is a binding argument from which they have no escape save by abandoning their figurative reading and returning to the interpretation of the early generations. When one of their own dialectical theologians became aware of this, he produced yet another calamity: he claimed that istīlāʾ—“seizing control,” which in their view is what istiwāʾ really means—should itself be understood as a seizure absolutely void of any notion of overcoming an opponent!⦗1⦘

I say: Apart from the fact that this clashes with the Arabic language, as we have already quoted from Ibn al-Aʿrābī, the most that can be said of it is that it is a reinterpretation of a reinterpretation! I wonder what drove them into such straits. Would it not have been better for them simply to say, “He rose in exaltation, free of any resemblance”—even though the word istaʿlā in Arabic does not in the least entail resemblance? For istiwāʾ in the Qur’an—let alone in ordinary speech—is attributed both to Allah, as in the verses describing His istiwāʾ over the Throne (some of which we have already cited), and to other things. Of Noah’s Ark He says, “it settled upon Mount Jūdī,” and of plants, “it grows upright upon its stalks.” The istiwāʾ of the Ark is therefore unlike the istiwāʾ of the plant. The same holds for a person’s istiwāʾ on the back of a mount, a bird’s istiwāʾ upon a man’s head, or someone’s istiwāʾ atop a roof. All of these are istiwāʾ, yet each according to its nature: they share the word while differing in reality. Allah’s istiwāʾ, then, is an exaltation and elevation befitting Him; “there is nothing like unto Him.”

By contrast, the term istīlāʾ has never been used of Allah at all except by these dialecticians themselves. Consider what speculative theology has done to its devotees: it has made it seem fair to describe Allah with something that belongs by its very nature to created beings, while they refuse to describe Him with exaltation, a quality that admits of no likeness and was affirmed by the early scholars. It is no wonder, then, that they eventually concurred in censuring kalām and its practitioners—some of whose statements to that effect will appear later in this book. Certain later scholars agreed with them; thus al-Subkī says in the introduction to his treatise Al-Sayf al-Ṣaqīl (p. 12):

“Nothing is more injurious to matters of creed than two things: dialectical theology and Greek philosophy …”