Al-ʿAzzāmī, too, voices the same idea in several places, although his wording is, “Most of the salaf refrained from clarifying the meaning that befits the True One, exalted be He” (p. 94; likewise on pp. 81 and 5). Thus he ascribes to the majority of the early scholars that they deliberately avoided explaining the meaning appropriate to Allah. Was that due to ignorance of their Lord, or a deliberate concealment of knowledge? Whichever answer he chooses, as the proverb puts it, both alternatives are bitter. And Allah the Mighty has spoken the truth: “That is the utmost reach of their knowledge” (Q 53:30).
To sum up, the figurative interpretation championed by the khalaf is, as Ibn al-Qayyim—may Allah have mercy on him—states halfway through his magnificent poem al-Kāfiyah al-Shāfiyah in defence of the Saved Sect, commonly known as the Nūniyyah:
“Indeed, the very root of Islam’s calamity
Is an interpretation tainted by distortion and falsehood.”
He then expounds in verse upon its harms in a way unmatched even by prose. Consult it, for it is of the utmost importance, and read it together with the commentary of Shaykh Aḥmad ibn ʿĪsā entitled Tawḍīḥ al-Maqāṣid wa Taṣḥīḥ al-Qawāʿid bi-Sharḥ Qaṣīdat Ibn al-Qayyim.¹
What continues to astonish me about al-Kawtharī and those like him is their claim that the righteous forebears, regarding the verses of the attributes, practised tafwīḍ—consigning the meaning and not enquiring into what is meant—as we have already quoted from him explicitly. If his heart holds no reverence for the salaf and their learning to deter his tongue from utterances that diminish their standing in knowledge of Allah and His attributes, has he at least not come across what the scholars have transmitted from them—statements differing in wording yet united in substance, all revolving around a single point: affirming the attributes while refuting both the deniers who strip them away and the anthropomorphists who liken them to created attributes? Here are a few of those texts, which you will also find in this book under their biographical entries, Allah willing.
- Al-Walīd ibn Muslim said: “I asked al-Awzāʿī, Mālik ibn Anas, Sufyān al-Thawrī, and al-Layth ibn Saʿd about the hadiths concerning the attributes, and they all replied to me:”