His words, wrenching them from their proper contexts and re-reading them in senses other than those He intended, hunting for strained possibilities and interpretations that resemble riddles and brain-teasers more than they do clarity and elucidation. He would, on this view, have referred people for knowledge of His names and attributes to their own intellects and opinions rather than to His book, and He would have wanted them to understand His speech only by the conventions of their own discourse and language—while He was fully able to state the truth in explicit wording, relieve them of expressions that cast them into false belief, and spare them confusion. Yet, according to them, He did none of this; instead He led them down a road opposite to guidance and exposition. Such a notion is nothing but an evil suspicion of Him.

For if someone says that Allah is unable to convey the truth in the plain terms employed by Him and by earlier generations, he ascribes inability to His power. And if he says that Allah is able but nevertheless left the truth unexplained, abandoning clarity and explicitness for what merely suggests—and indeed plunges people into—impossible falsehoods and corrupt beliefs, he has impugned His wisdom and mercy. Whoever imagines that he and those before him have expressed the truth in unequivocal terms while Allah and His Messenger have not, that guidance and truth lie in their own words and phrases whereas the apparent sense of Allah’s words yields only assimilation, likeness, and misguidance, and that the outward speech of the confused and bewildered is the very truth and guidance—such a person harbors one of the worst opinions of Allah….” He went on to say: “And whoever thinks that He possesses neither hearing nor sight nor knowledge nor will nor speech with which He speaks; that He has never addressed anyone in creation and never will; that He never has spoken, never will speak, and issues neither command nor prohibition—such a person has presumed evil of Him. And whoever thinks that He is not above His heavens, upon His Throne, distinct from His creation, and that His being is related to the Throne no differently than to the lowest depths, has entertained the most repugnant and disgraceful notions about Him….” End of his words—may Allah have mercy on him.

What he means, of course, are those who deny what Allah has affirmed for Himself of perfect attributes—namely the Jahmiyyah, the Muʿtazilah, and the Ashʿarites. It is evident that whoever strips Allah of attributes of perfection necessarily attributes to Him their opposites: attributes of deficiency. Exalted is Allah, immeasurably above what the wrong-doers allege! This further implies that these deviants are—so they claim—more knowledgeable about Allah and what befits Him than Allah Himself, for they have negated from Him what He affirmed for Himself and declared that such attributes do not befit Him. And what misguidance could be greater than