are three issues:

1. Describing Allah as exalted above the Throne;
2. The question of the Qur’an;
3. The question of interpreting the divine attributes.

So I said to him, “Let us begin with the matter of interpreting the attributes, for it is the root, and the remaining issues branch out from it.”

I then added, “The doctrine of the People of Hadith—namely, the early generations (the first three centuries) and everyone who has followed their path among later scholars—is that these reports are to be accepted exactly as they have come. One believes in them, affirms them, and protects them from a figurative interpretation that leads to negation (taʿṭīl) or from assigning a modality that leads to likening Allah to creation (tashbīh).

More than one scholar who transmitted the consensus of the Salaf—among them al-Khaṭṭābī—has stated, without qualification, that the texts are carried upon their apparent sense while simultaneously denying any modality or resemblance. Discourse about the attributes is secondary to discourse about the Essence: it follows the same pattern and is judged by the same standard. Just as affirming the Essence means affirming its existence, not its modality, so affirming the attributes means affirming their existence, not their modality.

Thus we say, ‘He has a hand and hearing,’ but we do not say, ‘Hand means power,’ or ‘Hearing means knowledge.’

I went on to tell him, “Some people claim that the way of the Salaf is to say that the apparent sense (ẓāhir) is not intended, and they assert a consensus to that effect. This phrasing is mistaken—either in wording and meaning, or at the very least in wording—because the term ẓāhir has become ambiguous between two possibilities.

The first is to say that ‘hand’ is a limb like human limbs, that the apparent sense of ‘anger’ is a boiling of the heart in pursuit of vengeance, and that the apparent sense of His being ‘in the heaven’ is that He is like water inside a container. There is no doubt that anyone who says such meanings—or anything similar drawn from the attributes of created beings and the qualities of contingent things—are not intended by the verses and hadiths has spoken truthfully and done well, for the People of the Sunnah agree that ‘Nothing is like Him’ in His Essence, His attributes, or His acts. Indeed, most Sunnis—both from our own school and others—declare the anthropomorphists (mushabbihah) and corporealists (mujassimah) to be unbelievers.

However, this person erred in imagining that such a meaning is the apparent sense of these verses and hadiths, and in attributing to the Salaf what they never said. The apparent meaning of speech is what first comes to a sound mind versed in the language, either by the very force of the words or by the context. These recent, impossible notions attributed to Allah, Exalted is He, are not what first occur to believing minds. Rather, ‘hand’ for them is like ‘knowledge,’ ‘power,’ and ‘Essence’ itself: just as our knowledge, power, life, speech, and similar attributes are accidents that indicate