So I said to him:
Whoever says, “The apparent sense is not intended,” meaning only that the attributes of created beings are not intended, we answer him: You are correct as to the meaning, yet you erred in your wording, gave the impression of innovation, and opened a door for the Jahmiyyah to reach their objective. You could simply have said: “We accept the texts as they have come, upon their apparent sense, while knowing that the attributes of Allah Most High are unlike the attributes of His creatures and that He is exalted and sanctified above anything that would imply origination or deficiency.”

But whoever says, “The apparent sense is not intended,” in the second sense—the sense intended by the Jahmiyyah and those who follow them among the Muʿtazilah, some Ashʿarīs, and others—has indeed gone astray.

The closest of these Jahmiyyah are the Ashʿarīs, who maintain that He possesses only seven attributes: life, knowledge, power, will, speech, hearing, and sight. They deny all others. Some of them add the hand alone; some suspend judgment regarding the rest; while their extremists categorically reject every other attribute.

As for the Muʿtazilah, they deny all attributes outright but affirm their effects. For most of them this reduces to the claim that He is knowing and powerful, whereas His being willing or speaking they deem contingent, relational, or merely negative attributes. They are the group closest to the Sabian philosophers among the Greeks—and to those from the Arabs and Persians who followed their path—who alleged that every attribute ultimately reverts to either pure negation, relation, or a compound of the two. All such people are misguided and belie the messengers.

Whoever is granted by Allah insight into the revelation brought by the messengers and a penetrating vision, and who understands the true basis of these groups, will know with certainty that they distort His names and verses and that they have denied the messengers, the Book, and that with which the messengers were sent.

For this reason it used to be said: “Innovations spring from disbelief and lead back to it.”
And they also said: “The Muʿtazilah are the philosophers’ effeminates, and the Ashʿarīs are the Muʿtazilah’s effeminates.”

Yahya ibn ʿAmmār would say: “The Muʿtazilah are the male Jahmiyyah, and the Ashʿarīs are the female Jahmiyyah”—meaning those Ashʿarīs who deny the textual attributes.

As for anyone among them who upholds the doctrine set out in al-Ibāna, the book al-Ashʿarī composed at the end of his life, and who has not shown any view contradicting it, he is counted among Ahl al-Sunnah. Yet merely affiliating oneself to al-Ashʿarī is itself an innovation, especially since it lends an aura of legitimacy to everyone who claims this affiliation and thereby opens the doors to further mischief. Our present discussion is with those who negate the apparent sense under this interpretation.