ibn Ḥanbal—or anyone else—ever counted those passages among the ambiguous verses mentioned in the Almighty’s words, “It is He who has sent down to you the Book; in it are verses that are clear and decisive—they are the foundation of the Book—while others are ambiguous…”⦗1⦘, then went on to deny that anyone knows their meaning. They would have reduced Allah’s names and attributes to the level of foreign speech that no one understands, claiming only that the words do possess sound meanings. Concerning the hadiths on the attributes they said, “Let them pass exactly as they came,” and they forbade the hermeneutical gymnastics of the Jahmiyyah, rejecting and refuting them, for those interpretations in fact strip the texts of what they indicate. The explicit statements of Ahmad and the imams before him show that they invalidated the Jahmiyyah’s interpretations and affirmed the texts according to the meanings they convey. Thus the imams were unanimously agreed that they did understand the meaning of these passages and that it is impermissible to keep silent about clarifying and explaining them; rather, by consensus the imams held that they must be clarified and explained—without distorting them, and without deviation in Allah’s names or His verses.

This is the position established by Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah have mercy on him—and which he related from the imams and the early generations: they did not treat the scriptural texts on the attributes as incomprehensible mutashābih that must be consigned to Allah. On the contrary, they knew the meanings of these texts and interpreted them, while consigning knowledge of their modality to Allah alone, just as Imām Mālik and others said: “Istiwāʾ (rising over) is known, its ‘how’ is unknown, belief in it is obligatory, and asking about it is an innovation.”

Imām Ibn Kathīr—may Allah have mercy on him—said: “As for His statement, ‘then He rose over the Throne’⦗2⦘, people hold a great many opinions on this matter, and this is not the place to detail them. What we adopt here is the path of the Salaf—Mālik, al-Awzāʿī, al-Thawrī, al-Layth ibn Saʿd, al-Shāfiʿī, Aḥmad, Isḥāq ibn Rāhawayh, and the other imams of the Muslims, early and late—which is to let the text pass as it came, without enquiring into the modality, without likening, and without nullifying. Whatever literal sense first occurs to the minds of those who liken Allah to His creation is denied of Him, for nothing resembles Him in His creation: ‘There is nothing like unto Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing’⦗3⦘. The matter is exactly as the imams have said, among them Nuʿaym ibn Ḥammād…”