The Question of Divine Transcendence

Imam Kamal ad-Din Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahid ibn al-Humam al-Hanafi wrote, in Musayarah fi ‘Ilm al-Kalam wa al-‘Aqa’id Tawhidiyyah, “It is obligatory to believe that Allah is Established on the Throne while negating any likeness to Creation.  As for saying that His Establishment is a conquering move, it is permissible but not obligatory since there is no evidence for it specifically.”  He continued, “However, if it is feared that the common people will not understand istiwa’ without conceiving of contact and other corporeal characteristics, and if they do not negate the latter, then there is no harm in directing their understanding to istila’, as its usage and meaning for istiwa’ is established in language from the poet’s saying, ‘Bishr has conquered Iraq,’ and ‘When we towered above them and conquered them’ ...”

Imam al-Humam was not a scholar who hedged his positions out of intellectual timidity.  He was among the most rigorous theological minds of the ninth Hijri century — a Hanafi jurist, an Ash’ari theologian, and a Sufi whose Fath al-Qadir commentary on al-Hidayah remains among the most authoritative works in Hanafi fiqh.  The question he addresses in al-Musayarah is one of the most technically demanding in Islamic theology: what does it mean when the Qur’an States that Allah is Established upon the Throne?

The Verse and the Problem

Surah ThaHa (20:5) States:

ٱلرَّحْمَٰنُ عَلَى ٱلْعَرْشِ ٱسْتَوَىٰ

The Most Merciful — upon the Throne He Settled.

The word “istawa’” (استوى) is the theological crux.  In ordinary Arabic usage, “istawa’” can mean to be established upon, to settle upon, to be level, to be balanced, or to conquer and dominate.  The last meaning — conquest, dominion, mastery — produces the word “istila’” (استيلاء), which is the interpretive approach that Imam ibn al-Humam was addressing.

The problem is this: if istawa’ is read literally — as physical settling or resting upon — it implies that Allah has a spatial relationship with a physical object, the Throne.  It implies dimension, location, and a body that can be in a place.  This contradicts the fundamental principle of Divine Transcendence — tanzih (تنزيه) — which the Ash’ari and Maturidi theological schools, representing mainstream Sunni orthodoxy, consider non-negotiable.

The Qur’an Itself States in Surah ash-Shura (42:11): لَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِ شَيْءٌ — “There is nothing like unto Him.”  The verse is absolute.  It does not contain exceptions for the Throne.

The Two Approaches

The classical Sunni theological tradition developed two principal approaches to istawa’ and similar verses describing Allah in apparently corporeal terms.  The first is تفويض (tafwidh) consignment of meaning to Allah.  The text is affirmed as it stands.  Its meaning is left to Divine Knowledge.  The human intellect acknowledges that it cannot encompass the Divine Reality and refrains from specifying a meaning that might inadvertently attribute a creaturely characteristic to the Creator.  This was the predominant approach of the early Salaf — the first three generations of Muslims — according to the mainstream Sunni scholarly reconstruction.

The second is تأويل (ta’wil) — interpretive figurative reading.  The verse is interpreted according to an established Arabic linguistic meaning that preserves divine transcendence.  Istawa’ becomes istila’ — conquest, dominion, mastery.  The meaning is linguistically defensible and theologically safe.  Imam ibn al-Humam addressed both approaches with characteristic precision.  His position is nuanced in a way that superficial readings of the debate frequently miss.

What He Actually Said

He wrote that it is obligatory to believe that Allah is established on the Throne while negating any likeness to Creation.  This is the non-negotiable foundation.  The istawa’ is affirmed.  The corporeal implication is negated.  The precise nature of the istawa’ is not specified beyond the negation of likeness.  He then addressed the istila’ interpretation — reading istawa’ as conquest and dominion.  His position: permissible but not obligatory, because there is no specific textual evidence requiring it.

This is a carefully calibrated statement.  He is not endorsing istila’ as the correct meaning.  He is not condemning it as heretical.  He is placing it in its proper category: a legitimate interpretive option that has Arabic linguistic support — citing the poetic usage “Bishr has conquered Iraq” (qad istawa Bishrun ‘ala al-‘Iraq) as evidence that istawa’ can carry the meaning of dominion in classical Arabic — but which is not the only acceptable approach and should not be presented as definitively correct.  His key practical point follows: if the common people cannot understand istawa’ without immediately and irresistibly conceiving of physical contact — Allah sitting on the Throne the way a human sits on a chair — and if they cannot negate that corporeal image through a careful understanding of divine transcendence, then directing their understanding toward istila’ is permissible and causes no harm.

This is pedagogical theology.  The scholar’s obligation is not merely to be correct but to produce correct understanding in the listener.  An explanation that is technically accurate but produces a false image in the mind of the hearer has failed its purpose.  If istawa’ produces the image of divine embodiment and istila’ does not, and if the common Muslim cannot perform the sophisticated simultaneous affirmation-and-negation that istawa’ requires of a trained theologian, then istila’ is the more pastorally responsible explanation.

The Ash’ari-Maturidi Framework

Imam ibn al-Humam was writing within the Maturidi theological tradition — the school founded by Imam Abu Manswur Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Maturidi of Samarkand, which is the theological framework of the Hanafi madhhab across Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Ottoman world.

The Maturidi and Ash’ari schools agree on the fundamental principles regarding divine attributes — both affirm that Allah Possesses the attributes described in the Qur’an and Sunnah, both negate any resemblance to creaturely attributes, and both employ some form of either tafwidh or ta’wil to navigate the apparently anthropomorphic verses.  Their differences are on secondary theological questions and matters of emphasis rather than on the core principle of tanzih.

Both schools stand in explicit opposition to the approach that reads istawa’ literally — that takes “Established upon the Throne” to mean that Allah has a physical relationship with a physical object.  This literal reading, associated with certain strands of the Hanbali tradition in its more extreme expressions, and subsequently with Wahhabi and Salafi theology, is what both the Ash’ari and Maturidi schools classify as tajsim (تجسيم) — corporealism — and consider a deviation from Sunni orthodoxy.

Imam ibn al-Humam was addressing an audience that already accepts the Ash’ari-Maturidi framework.  His nuanced position on istila’ is an internal discussion within that framework — not a concession to literalism but a careful delineation of the options available within the space that both tafwidh and legitimate ta’wil occupy.

The Linguistic Evidence

The Arabic poetic evidence Imam ibn al-Humam cited is not incidental.  It is the basis of the ta’wil’s legitimacy.  Classical Arabic scholarship — particularly the tradition of tafsir and uswul al-fiqh — is extremely careful about the relationship between Qur’anic interpretation and established Arabic usage.  A ta’wil that lacks Arabic linguistic support is not a ta’wil, it is an imposition of meaning on the text without textual authority.  The ta’wil of istawa’ as istila’ is justified precisely because the usage of istawa’ to mean conquest and dominion is documented in classical Arabic poetry — the most authoritative repository of Arabic linguistic norms in the Islamic scholarly tradition.

The line he cited — qad istawa Bishrun ‘ala al-‘Iraq — “Bishr has conquered Iraq” — uses istawa’ in exactly the sense of dominion and mastery over a territory.  Bishr did not physically sit on Iraq.  He established authority over it.  The verse is cited by numerous classical scholars — including Imam Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn al-Sari al-Zajjaj, the ninth-century grammarian — as evidence that istawa’ can carry this meaning in Arabic usage without any physical contact being implied.  This linguistic evidence is what separates legitimate ta’wil from arbitrary reinterpretation.  The scholar who performs ta’wil of a Divine Attribute is not abandoning the text.  They are reading it through the full range of meanings the Arabic language makes available — and selecting the meaning that preserves divine transcendence while remaining grounded in documented linguistic usage.

Why This Matters Today

The question Imam ibn al-Humam addressed is not a medieval curiosity.  It is live and consequential in contemporary Islamic discourse.  The Wahhabi and Salafi theological positions — which have been exported globally through Gulf state funding of mosques, madaris, and Islamic centres since the 1970s — take a literalist approach to the Divine Attributes that the Ash’ari and Maturidi traditions classify as tajsim.  The istawa’ of Surah ThaHa is read as straightforwardly physical — Allah is Above, on the Throne, in a manner befitting His Majesty, but still in a manner that implies spatial location.

This position is presented in much contemporary Salafi discourse as the authentic Sunni position — the position of the Salaf, the early generations — against what is characterised as the rationalist deviation of the Ash’ari and Maturidi schools.  The classical scholarly record does not support this presentation.  Imam ibn al-Humam — writing in the ninth Hijri century within the Hanafi-Maturidi tradition — represents a continuous scholarly tradition that predates the Wahhabi movement by three centuries, and that consistently held the tanzih principle as non-negotiable.  Imam Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Isma’il al-Ash’ari, whose theological school the Salafi critique targets, was a student of the Mu’tazilah who turned against rationalist theology precisely because he considered its departures from transmitted doctrine excessive.  His tanzih was not a philosophical imposition on the text.  It was a reading of the text in light of its own internal evidence, لَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِ شَيْءٌ, being the controlling principle against which all apparently anthropomorphic verses must be read.

The contemporary Muslim who encounters Salafi criticism of the Ash’ari and Maturidi positions on divine attributes would benefit from reading Imam ibn al-Humam carefully.  Not because the istila’ interpretation is obligatory — he explicitly said it is not — but because the framework within which he operated demonstrates that the mainstream Sunni tradition has always held divine transcendence as the non-negotiable foundation, has always employed careful ta’wil or tafwidh in preference to literal corporealism, and has done so not as a deviation from the Salaf but as the faithful transmission of their essential principle.

The Throne is real.  The istawa’ is real.  Allah is Established upon it in a manner that befits His Absolute Transcendence and admits no likeness to Creation.  What precisely that manner is, the human intellect cannot compass.  That is not intellectual evasion.  It is the honest acknowledgement of the distance between the Created intellect and the uncreated divine reality.  Imam ibn al-Humam understood this.  The tradition he represented built its theological architecture on it.