and corporeality inevitably follows; but if they explain it as something non-sensory, that is nothing but figurative interpretation—and they have fallen into the very thing they forbade!”

I say: “Easy now, esteemed Shaykh. You know full well that Ibn Taymiyyah never explains istiwāʾ by anything you have mentioned; he restricts it to exaltedness (ʿulū), and his books are replete with that. Why, then, did you give readers a contrary impression? Why did you not keep to your usual practice of quoting Ibn Taymiyyah verbatim while presenting his creed and views? Did you grow weary of the duty to transmit accurately and thus begin to attribute to him what is unsound—sometimes by insinuation, as you have done here, and at other times explicitly, as you did in your other book, al-Madhāhib al-Islāmiyyah, where, in the section on ‘Salafiyyah’ and Imām Ibn Taymiyyah (p. 320), you wrote:

“Thus they affirm everything that appears in the Qur’an and Sunnah concerning His attributes—glorified be He … and they affirm His settling upon the Throne.”

Where have you ever seen Ibn Taymiyyah speak of “settling upon the Throne,” bearing in mind that this is an additional notion beyond exaltedness and is not found in the sacred texts? Indeed, we find our author, the ḥāfiẓ al-Dhahabī, censuring some who, when discussing the attribute of exaltedness, phrase it as “settling,” as appears in biography 158, paragraph 322. Abū Zahrah also says (p. 322) of the same book:

“Ibn Taymiyyah states that the doctrine of the salaf is to affirm everything found in the Qur’an of superiority, inferiority, and istiwāʾ upon the Throne!”

And on the previous page he writes: “He repeats this point, insisting that Allah descends and is both above and below without modality.”

So where did Ibn Taymiyyah ever affirm for Allah Most High an attribute of “inferiority”? It is highly likely that Shaykh Abū Zahrah inferred this alleged inferiority from the hadiths of descent and then ascribed it to Ibn Taymiyyah, just as he inferred from the verses of istiwāʾ the idea of “settling” and then attributed that to him. All of this is mistaken, as anyone who studies his works with true understanding and reflection—rather than in haste merely to quote him in a biography and fill its pages—will readily see!