—has lied about them, for their own words flatly contradict this slanderer.

Third: The early generation affirm the divine attributes without likening them to those of created beings. They never compare Him to His creatures, for “there is nothing like unto Him,” He has no peer, no equal, no rival, and no namesake. To liken His attributes to the attributes of the creation is to claim knowledge of their modality, yet their modality is unknown to us just as the modality of His Essence is unknown. Knowing how an attribute is necessarily entails knowing how the One described is, and no one knows how Allah’s Essence is except Him.

Discussion of the attributes follows upon discussion of the Essence. Just as Allah possesses an Essence unlike all essences, He likewise possesses attributes unlike all attributes: “There is nothing like unto Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing.”⦗1⦘ That is, no one resembles Him—neither in His Essence, nor in His attributes, nor in His acts. It is therefore obligatory to believe whatever Allah has said about Himself, for no one knows Allah better than Allah: “Are you more knowledgeable or is Allah?”⦗2⦘ He knows Himself and all else best.

It is likewise obligatory to believe whatever the Messenger of Allah ﷺ has said about Him, for after Allah no one knows Allah better than the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, concerning whom Allah said: “He does not speak from desire; it is but a revelation sent down.”⦗3⦘ Every accountable person is thus required to believe what Allah has affirmed for Himself or what His Messenger ﷺ has affirmed for Him, while declaring his Lord—majestic and exalted—to be far above any resemblance between His attributes and those of the creation.

Whoever dares to step ahead of Allah and His Messenger, negating the magnificent attributes Allah affirmed for Himself and that His Messenger ﷺ affirmed for Him, and then says, “What You have described Yourself with, and what Your Messenger has described You with, does not befit You; it contains such-and-such imperfection. I shall therefore reinterpret it, dismiss it, and replace it with something of my own making,” follows the maxim some of them have coined:

“Any text that seems to imply resemblance—
Allegorize it, or consign its meaning, claiming thereby to declare transcendence.”

Such a person no longer refers to Your Book or to the Sunnah of Your Prophet in these matters—because, he alleges, they suggest anthropomorphism—but rather turns to the maxims of the dialectical theologians and the statements of the Jahmiyyah, the Muʿtazilah, and the Ashʿarites.