the falsity of such talk—since it ascribes to Allah what is impossible, namely that He is contained by His creation, and since it contradicts His exaltedness above His Throne—some self-styled scholars hasten to reinterpret the statement by appending the phrase “by His knowledge,” as though it were a verse from the Quran or a hadith of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ that must be exegetically parsed! These poor souls do not realize that this is the very slogan and creed of the Jahmiyyah and the Muʿtazilah, exactly as its outward wording indicates, without any need for reinterpretation. When you hear them add “by His knowledge,” you may at first think well of them, but your good opinion is quickly dashed when you pose the question inherited from the infallible Prophet—the question that lays bare a person’s faith or ignorance of Allah—namely his ﷺ words to the slave-girl: “Where is Allah?” She replied, “In the heaven.” He said, “Set her free, for she is a believer.”
If you put that same question to ordinary folk and notables alike today, you will find them staring back in bewilderment, deeming it objectionable, ignorant—or pretending to be ignorant—of the fact that it was the Prophet ﷺ who instituted it for us. You will then see them utterly at a loss, not knowing how to reply, as though Islamic law had never addressed the matter in either the Book or the Sunnah, even though the proofs in both sources—recurrently transmitted—state that Allah is in the heaven. Hence, when the slave-girl answered “In the heaven,” the Prophet ﷺ attested to her faith because she had responded with what is known from the Quran and the Sunnah.
So woe to the one for whom the Messenger ﷺ does not testify to faith, and woe indeed to the one who rejects and finds fault with what he ﷺ made a proof of faith. By Allah, one of the gravest calamities that has befallen the Muslims in their creed is that a person may not know whether his Lord—whom he worships and before whom he prostrates—is above His creation or beneath them; indeed, he does not even know whether Allah is outside the creation or within it. Thus the saying of some early scholars has come true concerning them: “They have lost their object of worship.” Yet they have still not reached the depth of misguidance of those who declared Him non-existent when they said, “Neither above nor below …,” and so forth. Hence the apt remark: “The negator worships nothingness, and the corporealist worships an idol.” This refers to the Jahmiyyah—those who negate and deny—and to the anthropomorphists who affirm the attributes while turning them into corporeal qualities; the sound path lies, as explained earlier, between these two extremes.
Despite the gravity and supreme importance of this issue, and the fierce dispute over it between Ahl al-Sunnah on the one hand and the Jahmiyyah, Muʿtazilah and other deniers on the other, to the point that