The Divine Attributes: Neither Negation nor Likeness

The student raises one of the most persistent questions in Islamic theology: how should we understand the divine attributes mentioned in the Quran and Sunnah, such as Allah's hand, face, and settling over the throne? Some scholars, he notes, interpret these passages to mean that Allah possesses actual attributes of a specific nature corresponding to these words. Others negate these descriptions, holding that they must be reinterpreted as metaphors for divine power or mercy, lest affirming them lead to likening Allah to creatures. A third group simply passes these texts along without interpretation in either direction. Which approach does the scholar recommend?

Abu Hanifa's response articulates what became the foundational Hanafi theological stance: affirm what Allah and His Messenger have affirmed, without specifying the nature (kayfiyyah) and without likening Allah to creation (tashbih). Allah described Himself as having a hand, a face, and having settled over the throne. The Muslim affirms these descriptions because Allah and His Messenger affirmed them, and it is not for the creature to deny what the Creator has said about Himself. At the same time, the Quran itself provides the governing principle: 'There is nothing like Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing' (42:11). Whatever meaning these attributes carry when applied to Allah is entirely unlike the meaning they carry when applied to created beings. The hand of Allah is not like any created hand; the face of Allah is not like any created face.

The error of ta'til (emptying the attributes of their meaning through negation) is as serious as the error of tashbih (likening Allah to creation), Abu Hanifa explains. Those who say that 'hand' means merely power and 'face' means merely the divine essence have substituted their own reasoning for the text without justification, since the Quran and Sunnah consistently use these terms without the qualifications these reinterpreters add. The Quran is not composed of meaningless words, and if these terms carry no real content then the divine communication is to that extent empty of meaning. The student asks: but does affirming 'hand' not inevitably suggest a physical limb? Abu Hanifa responds that the suggestion of physicality comes from comparing the unknown to the known, which is precisely what 'there is nothing like Him' forbids us from doing.

This middle path, rejecting both ta'til and tashbih, became the core of Hanafi and Maturidi theology and represents a position very close to what the Ash'ari school would later formalize as well. Abu Hanifa reportedly stated this principle in his al-Fiqh al-Akbar: 'He has a hand and a face and a self (nafs), as Allah mentioned in the Quran. What Allah mentioned in the Quran regarding the face, the hand, and the self are attributes without asking how.' This 'without asking how' (bila kayf) formula is the practical application of the principle articulated in the dialogue: affirm what is affirmed in the revelation, deny any likeness to creation, and refrain from specifying the nature of what has been affirmed. The dialogue presents this not as an evasion of the question but as the theologically correct response to a question whose complete answer is beyond human knowledge.