and so will His Messenger and the believers.”¹

He said to Moses and Aaron—peace be upon them both—“Indeed I am with you; I hear and I see.”² Thus Allah has informed us that He sees the deeds of the children of Adam and that His Messenger, though a human being, also sees their deeds. He said, “Have they not seen the birds held under control, gliding in mid-air?”³—and the children of Adam likewise see the birds so held in the sky.

He, exalted is He, also said, “Build the Ark under Our eyes,”⁴ and, “Be patient with your Lord’s decree, for you are under Our eyes.”⁵ Hence our Lord affirmed for Himself an eye, and He affirmed eyes for the descendants of Adam when He said, “You see their eyes overflowing with tears.”⁶ Our Lord has therefore told us that He has an eye, and that the children of Adam have eyes.

He said to Iblis—may Allah curse him—“What prevented you from prostrating to what I created with My two hands?”⁷ And He said, “Rather, both His hands are outstretched; He bestows as He wills.”⁸ Thus our Lord—glorified and exalted—is affirmed to possess two hands, and He has informed us that the children of Adam likewise possess two hands.

So, according to these sinful deviants, does anyone who merely affirms what Allah has affirmed in these passages thereby liken his Creator to His creation? Far be it from Allah that this should be assimilation, as they claim out of ignorance of knowledge….” End of his words.

This is part of the rebuttal that the “Imam of the Imams,” Muḥammad ibn Khuzaymah, directed against the Jahmites and their disciples. It is a crushing refutation to which they cannot reply. Other great imams—such as Imam Aḥmad, Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah, and Imam Ibn al-Qayyim—have also refuted them, and, praise be to Allah, their answers are still preserved among Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jamāʿah.

We shall now present an example from Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah’s response to a faction of these people who claimed that the texts concerning Allah’s attributes found in the Quran and the Sunnah belong to the category of mutashābih (ambiguous) whose meaning Allah alone knows, so that no one else can understand them. According to their allegation, these texts are not to be taken in their apparent sense, for the apparent sense, in their eyes, entails assimilation; rather, they have