the hadith of the slave-girl in which the Prophet ﷺ asked her, “Where is Allah?” She replied, “In the heaven.” He ﷺ then said, “Set her free, for she is a believer.” Their doomed imitator al-Saqqāf followed them in this, indeed outstripping them in insolence and conceit. In his marginal notes on Dafʿ Shubah al-Tashbīh (p. 108) he writes:

“We categorically affirm that the Prophet ﷺ never said, ‘Where is Allah?’”

And on page 188 he further declares:

“That reprehensible wording!”

This reckless man says such things while fully aware that the hadith is unanimously deemed authentic by the scholars of Islam, has been accepted generation after generation, and was employed as evidence by the leading Imams—Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, Aḥmad, and others. Muslim, Abū ʿAwānah, Ibn al-Jārūd, Ibn Khuzaymah, and Ibn Ḥibbān all graded it sound; after them a host of hadith masters—some even from among the interpreters—such as al-Bayhaqī, al-Baghawī, Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Dhahabī, and Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī—did the same.

So what can a reasonable Muslim say about an ignorant, obstinate denier who opposes all these Imams and hadith authorities, vilifies a wording of the Prophet ﷺ that they authenticated, and even brands those who repeat this Prophetic phrase (p. 187) as “anthropomorphists”? He goes further still and censures His Eminence Shaykh Ibn Bāz—because, in his notes on Fatḥ al-Bārī (1/188), he championed the doctrine of Allah’s rising over His Throne and affirmed the permissibility of asking, “Where is Allah?”—and, referring to the Shaykh (may Allah preserve him), writes:

“No heed whatsoever is to be paid to the words of the annotator of Fatḥ al-Bārī, for he does not know …"