Such an attribution to Ibn Taymiyyah shows me that he never really understood Ibn Taymiyyah—his creed or his ideas. In fact, he probably never read all that Ibn Taymiyyah wrote in the very areas Shaykh Abū Zahrah discusses, even in the printed works, let alone the manuscripts—such as the volume published by al-Maktab al-Islāmī, Sharḥ Ḥadīth al-Nuzūl. In that treatise Ibn Taymiyyah, may Allah have mercy on him, affirms that the divine descent does not entail that the Throne becomes above Him while He is underneath it; such a relation belongs to created beings, whereas “there is nothing like unto Him.” This will be noted later under the biography of Imām Isḥāq ibn Rāhwayh, in commentary on paragraph ⦗211⦘¹.

Ibn Taymiyyah also says in Minhāj al-Sunnah, 2/248:

“Whoever among the ignorant imagines that, when He descends to the heaven of this world as the ḥadith states, the Throne is then above Him and He is squeezed between two layers of creation, has spoken contrary to the consensus of the salaf and in opposition to the Qur’an and the Sunnah, as has been fully explained elsewhere.”

Further proof that he did not grasp Ibn Taymiyyah is that he was not even convinced by the summary he himself provided (p. 276) in his book Ibn Taymiyyah, where he wrote:

“Ibn Taymiyyah holds that the terms ‘hand,’ ‘descent,’ ‘foot,’ ‘face,’ and ‘istiwāʾ’ are to be understood according to their apparent sense, yet with meanings that befit His noble Essence, as we have already quoted.”

Unconvinced of the soundness of this opinion—though it is the plain truth—he set about refuting it with feeble, confused words devoid of substance; that is the kindest description that can be offered. Immediately afterwards he says:

“Let us pause here. These expressions were originally coined for bodily meanings and cannot, in their literal sense, be applied to anything else. If they are used for something other than that, whether the referent be known or unknown, they are being employed outside their original meaning; in no circumstance can they be taken at face value. They must be interpreted, and thus Ibn Taymiyyah has merely fled one figurative interpretation only to fall into another, escaping a metaphorical exegesis only to land in an interpretation”