confronted with proofs, while in reality they do not hold this belief.”
He thus placed everything from “That is, how can they disbelieve…” to “…they do not hold this belief” within quotation marks, to give the impression that it was all al-Qurtubī’s statement. In reality, al-Qurtubī’s words end at “…from worshipping Me”; the remainder is the writer’s own wording. On top of this, he committed another falsification by omitting an earlier statement of al-Qurtubī’s explicitly acknowledging that the polytheists admitted that Allah, the Exalted, is “the Creator of these things.”
Indeed, al-Qurtubī explicitly distinguishes between associating partners with Allah in His lordship and associating partners with Him in His divinity. The author of Taysīr al-ʿAzīz al-Hamīd quoted him as saying: “The essence of forbidden polytheism is the belief that Allah, the Exalted, has a partner in divinity. This is the gravest form of polytheism, the polytheism of the pre-Islamic era. Next in rank is the belief that Allah, the Exalted, has a partner in action. This is the view of one who maintains that a being other than Allah, the Exalted, independently produces and brings an act into existence, even if he does not believe that being to be a god”1.
20 The writer said on p. 37: “Know—may Allah, the Exalted, have mercy on you—that Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah, including the Ashʿarīs and Māturīdīs, affirm for Allah the attributes He has affirmed for Himself. The claims made against them by the corporealists—that they are deniers of the divine attributes and Jahmīs—are nothing but empty obfuscation, worthless when subjected to scholarly examination and scrutiny.”
I say: By “corporealists” he means Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah, for they are the ones who call the Ashʿarīs, Māturīdīs, and other speculative theologians deniers of the divine attributes, with reference to those attributes of Allah, the Exalted, that they reject.