My Hair Stands on End

It was among the early Ḥanbalīs that this problem of tajsīm came about, and initially it was serious tajsīm: pure corporealism. Ibn al-Jawzī, Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī, the great scholar, wrote a number of different works; alḥamdulillāh, he was not on that path; but he used to complain a lot about his fellow Ḥanbalīs. He said on one occasion: “My hair stands on end when I hear what some of my fellow Ḥanbalīs are saying.”

They say that one can say Allah has a face, because Allah says so in the Qur'an. One can say that He has a shin, because He says so. One can say He has a hand, because He has that as well; He mentions that as well. One can say Allah runs, because He mentions that. But one cannot say that He has a head, because He does not mention that. What kind of a monster is somebody trying to create here? To go to that level, and talk like that about these obscurities, is where the problem arises.

What happened then is this. After the time of Ibn Taymiyyah (may Allah have mercy on him), in his time and after, they stopped making this so blatant. Then it became: look, we have to believe that when Allah says hand, it literally means hand; it is not metaphorical. They say: sallim ḥaqīqatahu wa fawwiḍ kayfiyyatahu, which means, affirm its literal meaning, but leave the description of it to Allah. So they say that they are doing tafwīḍ. But they do it after taking one step. The Salaf used to do it without taking any step; or they would only do it after taking away any unsuitable meaning from Allah.

So the true Salaf, like Abū Ḥanīfah and so on, said: do not do taʾwīl; leave it completely to Allah. Do not insist that it is ḥaqīqah or majāz; leave it to Allah. Just take away any unsuitable connotation.

Whereas what the people today who follow this methodology of Ibn Taymiyyah and others do is this: they say that initially one has to insist on the ḥaqīqah, that it is not majāz, it is not metaphorical. So when one says yad, it is yad, literally, but we do not know its description. And it is not a limb. A lot of them will then clarify: it is not a limb, but it is a yad. It is as though they take a person right there, and then say: no, it is not that. But for a lot of common people on the street, it is hard to know where that is going to get them. It is highly problematic, the way in which that is being said.

So when they say that they are Salafī, and that it is a Salafī opinion, that is completely incorrect. Because what they are doing is one taʾwīl, and then tafwīḍ. The Salafīs are doing a taʾwīl, which is that first they take away the metaphorical meaning and insist on the literal meaning, and then they do tafwīḍ. Whereas the Salaf said: no, we are not going to worry about literal and metaphorical.