and who grasps its idiom and understands what true resemblance means—that this face is like that face—could ever imagine, O people of sound reason, that the Face of our Lord—exalted be His praise—whose description we have just drawn from the Qur’an and the Sunnah, is being likened to the faces of the children of Adam which we have already mentioned and described? …

Had our scholars really been engaged in assimilation, then everyone who says, “The children of Adam have faces, and so do pigs, monkeys, beasts of prey, donkeys, mules, serpents, and scorpions,” would by that token have equated the faces of human beings with the faces of pigs, monkeys, dogs, and the rest of the creatures I have named. I cannot imagine that even the most clear-headed of the Jahmite negators would fail to flare up in anger were the dearest of people to him to say, “Your face looks like the face of a pig, a monkey, a dog, a donkey, a mule, and the like.” …

He—may Allah have mercy on him—went on to say: “Since affairs are exactly as we have described, it is established in the minds of intelligent and discerning people that anyone who brands the devotees of transmitted reports—those who hold fast to their Lord’s Book and their Prophet’s Sunnah ﷺ—as assimilators has uttered nothing but falsehood, lies, slander, and sheer calumny; he has opposed the Book and the Sunnah and has abandoned the idiom of the Arabs …”.

He also said—may Allah have mercy on him: “The negators among the Jahmites repudiate every attribute that Allah has ascribed to Himself in His clear Revelation or upon the tongue of His Prophet ﷺ, out of sheer ignorance. They found in the Qur’an that Allah has applied some of the names of His attributes to certain creatures, and, because of their ignorance, imagined that whoever ascribes to Allah an attribute that He Himself has affirmed must have likened Him to His creation.

“So listen, O people of discernment, while I expose the ignorance of these deniers:

“I have found that Allah, in more than one place in His Book, informed His believing servants that He is Hearing and Seeing. He said, ‘He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing’ ¹, and He spoke of the human being, saying, ‘We made him hearing and seeing’ ².

“He likewise informed us—glorified and exalted is He—that He sees, when He said, ‘Say, “Act, and Allah will see your deeds …”’”