the associationists believe in it! That is utter misguidance.

The root of these Jahmites’ misguidance is that they were influenced by the Mu'tazilah and the Jahmiyyah, who went clearly astray by denying many matters of the Unseen relating to Allah and His attributes. This goes back to two things:

First, the weakness of their faith in Allah, His Messenger, and what has come from them both.

Second, the weakness of their intellects and their poor understanding of the texts. The example before you is this: they did not believe that Allah is in heaven, despite the explicitness of the verses on this matter, among them His saying, exalted is He: “Do you feel secure that He who is in heaven will not cause the earth to swallow you up, whereupon it suddenly begins to shake?” [al-Mulk 67:16] They also denied the authenticity of the slave-girl hadith, in which the Prophet testified to her faith because she knew her Lord to be in heaven. As for the verse, they set aside its indication through their diseased intellects, for their dull minds immediately assumed that the preposition “in” here denotes location. This is an evident error, so they fled from it by interpreting “He who” as referring to the angels, thereby falling into another error.

Then the Prophet’s saying stood in their way: “Show mercy to those upon the earth, and He who is above heaven will show you mercy.” This explicitly establishes that “in” in both clauses of the hadith means “upon.” When one of the ignorant Ghumaris saw that this invalidated his aforementioned interpretation, he hastened, with sheer brazenness and ignorance, to declare it “a false hadith”! (1) This was contrary to all the scholars, including his own Ghumari teachers, as I have demonstrated in the addendum printed at the end of the second volume of al-Sahihah, Amman edition, no. 12.