Giving an example that clarifies this noble condition, which is understanding the Book and the Sunnah according to the understanding of the Salaf of the Ummah.

The Shaykh : I usually give a simple example to clarify the importance of this condition that we derived from the previous verse and the first hadith I give a simple example: a verse in the Noble Qur'an, one of the clearest verses in explaining the divine intent, which is His saying, Blessed and Exalted is He, describing the people of Paradise in Paradise: What was the position of the Mu'tazilah and the Khawarij regarding this verse? It is explicit that among the blessings of Allah, Blessed and Exalted is He, upon the believers in Paradise—and indeed it is the greatest blessing by which Allah bestows upon the people of Paradise—is that they see their Lord on the Day of Resurrection. When they see Him, Blessed and Exalted is He, they forget all the pleasure of Paradise. What did the Mu'tazilah and the Khawarij do toward this verse? Did they deny it? No, they did not deny it, because if they had denied it, they would have exited the religion, just as a hair comes out of dough. But they denied its attributes and distorted its explicit meaning. They said, "Gazing at the pleasure of her Lord," claiming there is nothing in it. They assumed a deleted modifier, as we said earlier, to explain how one should understand the Arabic language, let alone the divine speech which is based on the Arabic language. "The prince came," "The king came"—is it permissible for us to understand that the servant of the prince or the king came? No. My brother, I tell you, this is a known matter in the Arabic language: assuming a deleted modifier. Here there is a discussion among the scholars of knowledge who say that assuming a deleted modifier is permissible when there is evidence necessitating it; otherwise, the Arabic language would be rendered inoperative. I say, "Ahmad came" does not mean his son came. "Abu Ahmad came"—did his son come? My brother, where did you get this figurative interpretation from? ... It renders the Arabic language inoperative. And this is what the Mu'tazilah and others did in interpreting the texts of the Book and the Sunnah.

The questioner : They understand the truth!

The Shaykh : They understand the truth, but the truth did not agree with their desires. Therefore, they tell you there is a necessity for figurative interpretation. What necessity? It did not enter their mind. And this means that we do not say they are not believers absolutely, but we say with boldness that their faith is deficient and weak. Because Allah, Mighty and Majestic, says at the beginning of Surat al-Baqarah: Who are they? The first attribute of the righteous is that they believe in the unseen. So, what is the unseen? It is not philosophy. They use human intellect like human strength. Can human strength remove a mountain from its place? No. Human strength is limited. Likewise, hearing is limited, sight is limited, and what else? Likewise, the intellect is limited. Everything means that man was created weak. So when they hear the verse it is sufficient for them. If we say we have restricted it to a direction, placed it above, placed it... These are among the doubts they derived from what they observe around them of the created beings. But they forgot that the Creator described Himself with two attributes: one positive and the other negative. The positive is an attribute subsisting in Him, and the negative is a negation of imperfection for Him, Blessed and Exalted is He. So He said: , A negation that any attribute of Allah, Mighty and Majestic, that comes to your mind, the matter becomes confused for you to be like our attributes. You say, "Nothing is like Him" But is it a meaning subsisting in the mind with no reality and no existence? Far be it from Him. We can now imagine the Phoenix (Anqa). The Anqa is an old Arabic imaginary name for a large bird. Sindbad the Sailor talks about it in the story of One Thousand and One Nights and similar stories, describing it as a large bird whose eggs are like domes, and he tells a story that is full of curiosity and wit, all of it imagination. The Anqa is a name without a body, a name in the mind, a meaning subsisting in the mind, but outside the mind, meaning in reality, it has no reality. Our Lord, Mighty and Majestic, has all attributes of perfection and is free from all attributes of imperfection. Is He like this, a meaning subsisting in our souls and not having a reality subsisting outside this universe? Outside this mind? Allah is greater than that. Rather, He created the heavens, so He has all attributes of perfection. Thus, He is an existing reality and has all attributes of perfection. Since the matter is so, what are His attributes, Mighty and Majestic? We have no room in our intellect to describe Him from our own side. Rather, He has relieved us of the burden of operating our intellects by describing Himself to us in the Book and in the Sunnah. Among these attributes is That the believers, as one of the jurists among the poets said, if we can say:
"They see Him without asking how, *** without likening Him to anything, and without any example". The seeing of Allah (Blessed and Exalted is He) is established in the Hereafter. The Mu'tazilah denied it, and the Khawarij denied it. Is this because there are no texts from the Book and the Sunnah? No, the texts exist, but they distorted them and denied the meanings of the divine attributes. So they did not benefit from their faith in these texts while denying the realities of their proofs. Therefore, we must believe in the text in both its wording and its meaning. The text is preserved and free from error. How do we know the meaning? Here is the crux of the matter, as they say: by referring to what the righteous Salaf were upon. The Qur'an is first interpreted by the Qur'an, then by the authentic Sunnah, then by the reports of the Salaf. Do we find among the righteous Salaf an interpretation of this verse , meaning "to the pleasure of her Lord"? Never. Every report coming from the Salaf agrees with the apparent meaning of the verse first, and then with the authentic, explicit hadiths indicating that the verse is to be understood by its apparent meaning, as every Arab would understand it, provided he has not been affected by a base desire, or by a wretched sectarian or partisan bias. There is another verse in which He the Exalted said: The interpretation of this verse came in an authentic hadith in Muslim: , meaning Paradise, , meaning the seeing of Allah in the Hereafter. They interpreted it with something else, such as seeing the blessings and the like of what was mentioned before. This is called denial of the divine attributes.