When You Hear About 20 Attributes

That makes four categories. Three were agreed upon, and one was a difference of opinion; and then there is a fourth one,^** which not everybody agrees with. It is a kind of addition, a follow-up of the third category. This fifth category is called the ṣifāt maʿnawiyyah. They are very simple, actually. Take life. Life, as a quality, is an attribute. What is someone with that called? The living. So Allah is being the living one. ʿIlm: Allah is being the knowledgeable one.

These are all what are called the ṣifāt maʿnawiyyah, the antithetic attributes: antithetic attributes, as accurate as they can probably be got in English, because ṣifāt maʿnawiyyah is something that has its maʿnā. They are basically active participles of the third category: Allah being the Ever-Living, being the All-Knowing, being the All-Willing, being the Almighty, being the All-Hearing, being the All-Seeing, being the one who speaks. Basically being the Ḥayy, ʿAlīm, Murīd, Qādir, Samīʿ, Baṣīr and Mutakallim.

So when takwīn is taken out, the fourth category, where there is a difference of opinion between the Māturīdīs and the Ashʿarīs, and the rest of them are counted, how many do they come to? Essential attribute: one. Negating attributes: five; that is six altogether. Then there are seven of the affirmative attributes. Seven plus… that is 13. And then, going with the fifth category, which is basically the active participles of the third, that is another seven. That would be 20.

So when one hears about 20 attributes of Allah, that is how it comes about. When different works say that Allah has 20 attributes, that is the way they get it to 20, because normally it is Ashʿarī works that will mention that. That is why they have 20: they do not have the active attributes, which is takwīn and the others, because they just consider that to be under qudrah.

Again, what is important here is that we recognize that Allah has all of these abilities, and that He has always had them; and all of these are mentioned in the Qur'an, in one way or the other. It is just that the scholars later categorized them this way. For anyone who cannot remember the categorization: as long as the ideas are correct, that is what is most important.

That said, some questions arising from all this deserve attention now, because these attributes and the like do need some kind of tapering down, some kind of understanding. The rest of the points of the creed carry on after that. Basically, in the next points Imam al-Ṭaḥāwī shows how these attributes are manifested — the different things that Allah (swt) does — and puts all of that in perspective. And he speaks about the will of Allah, and the human will, and things of that nature, which are covered in turn, inshāʾAllāh. First, though, some of the questions that arise here.