we therefore hastened to publish this book by al-Dhahabī which you now have in your hands, so that you might learn from it what may have been hidden from you—just as it was hidden from others—and which became a powerful reason for many to drift away from the Salafī creed and the Muhammadan path.
Al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Khaṭīb—may Allah have mercy on him—said:
“As for discussion of the divine attributes: whatever of them has been transmitted in the sound Sunan, the doctrine of the early generations—may Allah be pleased with them—is to affirm them, keep them upon their evident meaning, and deny any modality (kayfiyyah) or resemblance (tashbīh) for them. Some people have denied these attributes altogether, thereby rejecting what Allah, exalted be He, has affirmed; others, while affirming them, have investigated them in a way that led them into a form of anthropomorphism and specification. The aim, rather, is to follow the middle course between the two extremes, for the religion of Allah lies between excessive zeal and undue neglect.
The fundamental rule here is that talking about the attributes is a branch of talking about the Essence; it should follow the same pattern. Just as it is known that affirming the Lord of all worlds is an affirmation of His existence, not of His modality, so too affirming His attributes is an affirmation of their existence, not an affirmation of their limits or how-ness.
Thus, when we say that Allah possesses a hand, hearing, and sight, these are simply attributes that Allah has affirmed for Himself. We do not say that ‘hand’ means power, nor that hearing and sight mean knowledge; nor do we say that they are bodily organs or liken them to the hands, hearings, and sights that are bodily limbs and instruments of action. We affirm them only because revelation has brought them, and we negate any likeness because of His words, ‘There is nothing like unto Him; He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing,’ and His words, ‘And there is none comparable to Him.’
When the innovators criticised the transmitters for narrating these ḥadiths—misleading those of weak understanding by claiming they were transmitting what does not befit monotheism and is unsound in religion, hurling at them the charge of the anthropomorphists’ disbelief or the heedlessness of the negators—they were answered that in the Book of Allah are verses that are clear and unequivocal, whose intended meaning is understood from their outward wording, and verses that are ambiguous, whose meaning cannot be fully grasped.