Divine Attributes and Transcendence

At the heart of as-Sanusi's theology in Umm al-Barahin is the concept of tanzih — divine transcendence, or the absolute dissimilarity of God from created things. This concept drives the entire treatment of divine attributes and explains the specific positions taken on questions that were disputed between the Ash'ari/Maturidi kalam tradition and the Athari traditionalist approach.

For as-Sanusi and the kalam tradition he represents, affirming that God is absolutely transcendent means that any attribute applied to God must be understood in a way that eliminates any resemblance to created attributes. God's knowledge is not like human knowledge, which is acquired and limited. God's power is not like human power, which operates through physical effort and is constrained by circumstances. God's hearing and sight are not like human hearing and sight, which require physical organs and are limited by distance and medium. The divine attributes are real — as-Sanusi emphatically affirms them — but they are real in a manner that transcends created reality entirely.

This commitment to transcendence affects how as-Sanusi treats certain Quranic descriptions of God. Verses that speak of God's face, hands, or eyes; that describe God as settling on the Throne; or that speak of God coming on the Day of Judgment — all of these require careful interpretation, in as-Sanusi's view, to preserve divine transcendence. The appropriate interpretive move varies by case: some attributes he affirms while insisting on the complete difference of their reality from created analogs; others he interprets in ways that avoid any suggestion of divine spatiality or embodiment.

This is where the kalam tradition and the Athari tradition differ most significantly. The Athari position holds that these Quranic descriptions should be affirmed as real attributes without reinterpretation, while denying any resemblance to creation and refraining from asking how. The kalam tradition, including as-Sanusi, holds that the commitment to divine transcendence requires that certain descriptions cannot be taken in their apparent sense — that affirming God has a literal face, hands, or spatial location would constitute a form of anthropomorphism incompatible with proper monotheism.

As-Sanusi presents the kalam position with great clarity and argues for it carefully within Umm al-Barahin. He is not dismissive of the transmitted texts but rather develops an interpretive method that he believes honors both the authority of scripture and the rational necessity of divine transcendence. Both Ash'ari and Maturidi scholars largely shared this approach, though with some differences in where they drew interpretive lines on specific questions.

For students encountering this debate, it is important to recognize that both the kalam tradition represented by as-Sanusi and the Athari tradition are committed to the same foundational principle: God is utterly unlike created things. Their disagreement is about what that principle requires interpretively when applied to specific descriptions in the Quran and hadith.