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﴿ فَاسْأَلُوا أَهْلَ الذِّكْرِ إِن كُنتُمْ لَا تَعْلَمُونَ ﴾

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Are the angels bodies, or intellects, or merely powers?

Machine translationRead the Arabic original
Question : And here we ask: Are the angels bodies, or intellects, or powers?

Answer : Yes, the angels are bodies, without a doubt. This is without a doubt, as He the Mighty and Majestic said:
[who] made the angels messengers having wingsجَاعِلِ الْمَلَائِكَةِ رُسُلًا أُولِي أَجْنِحَةٍ
[Fatir 35:1]
And the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said: "The sky groaned," meaning it produced a groaning sound, a creaking, due to the weight of those upon it, and it has the right to do so, for there is no place of four fingers' width but that an angel is standing in it for Allah, or bowing, or prostrating.
And the hadith of Jibril indicates this, that he
with six hundred wings blocking outله ستمائة جناح قد سد
Mishkat al-Masabih 5661
the other, and the examples of this are many; I mean, the evidence for this is abundant.
As for the one who says that they are souls and have no bodies, his statement is denunciation and misguidance. And more denunciation than that is the one who says that the angels are a metaphor for the powers of good in the human soul, and the devils are a metaphor for the powers of evil; this is one of the best of the statements.
Source قناة «فضيلة الشيخ محمد بن صالح العثيمين»، 230 - 336 هل الملائكة أجسام أم عقول أم قوى فقط؟ - الشيخ ابن عثيمين — youtube.com

The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.

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