Since that is the case, there is no doubt that Allah’s creatures must be one of two things: either He created them within His very Essence, so that they reside in Him and He resides in them—an act of disbelief that no Muslim accepts, even though it is the logical outcome of the doctrine of the Jahmiyyah and of the extremist Sufis whose spokesman says, “Everything your eyes can see is Allah.” Exalted is He far above what the wrongdoers say.

Accordingly, His creatures are totally separate from Him and in no way intermingle with Him. From there only two possibilities remain: either Allah is above His creatures, or His creatures are above Him. The latter is self-evidently false, so what necessarily follows is that Allah—glorified be He—is above them. This conclusion is decisively established in the Qur’an, the Sunnah, the statements of the early generations, and the words of the scholars who succeeded them, despite their varied fields and legal schools, as you will see set out in detail later in this book, if Allah wills.

From this we realise how far astray the Jahmiyyah and those later theologians influenced by them have gone when they all denied that Allah is on His Throne, above His creation. These people then divided into two trends:

1. The doctrine of the Jahmiyyah, who claimed that Allah is in every created place.1 Imam Ahmad—may Allah have mercy on him—debated them admirably, exposing their falseness. He said in his treatise Refutation of the Jahmiyyah1:

   “If you wish to know that the Jahmi is lying about Allah when he claims that He is in every place and not in one place to the exclusion of another, ask him: ‘Was Allah when nothing else existed?’ He will answer, ‘Yes.’ Then say to him: ‘When He created things, did He create them within Himself or outside of Himself?’ He must fall back on one of three replies:
   a) If he claims that Allah created the creation within Himself, he has committed disbelief, for he has alleged that the jinn…"