—courteous, and unaffected by al-Kawtharī’s own stance toward him. Yet, regrettably, the pull of companionship prevailed; he began to impugn Ibn Taymiyyah’s creed, though only by insinuation, not outright as his friend does, and he openly attributed to him what he never said, as has already been shown. I do not claim he did so willfully, as al-Kawtharī did; rather, he was led astray by a poor grasp of Ibn Taymiyyah’s words—may Allah have mercy on him.

What confirms this is his statement that immediately follows the passage earlier quoted, in which he wrote: “Thus Ibn Taymiyyah fled from figurative interpretation only to fall into another interpretation….” He then says (p. 277):

“Then what is the final outcome, what is the ultimate purpose, of a purely literal explanation? Does it yield knowledge of the reality, or does it merely plunge us into other mazes? He—meaning Ibn Taymiyyah—asserts that the reality is unknown; he says that Allah has a face whose essence is unknown… that He has an istiwāʾ whose essence is unknown, and a hand….”

“Undoubtedly, if we interpret those meanings” (so he wrote—plainly a slip of the pen, for he meant the expressions) “with explanations that save us from consigning them to unknown entities, such an interpretation is worthier of acceptance, provided the language admits it and figurative usage within it is clear—such as interpreting ‘hand’ as power or retribution, ‘istiwāʾ’ as perfect sovereignty, and ‘descent’ as an effusion of divine blessings, and so forth. Nor can one object that this is not taking the words at face value, for what I have chosen does not take the apparent sense!”

Such are his words. Were we to expose all the errors and the distance from the straight path they contain—errors into which a scholar of his standing should never fall—the discussion would far exceed the limits of this introduction. I shall therefore say to the Shaykh a single, concise word:

Is it not enough for you, esteemed Shaykh, as an end and a goal, to understand that istiwāʾ is an attribute of Allah distinct from the attribute of descent, and that this attribute differs from the attributes of dominion and benefaction, and so on? Just as—I trust—it suffices for you to believe that the attribute of hearing is different from the attribute of sight, and that both differ from the attribute of knowledge, and that you do not nullify them or deny their existence by construing them in such a way that the intended meaning becomes merely