God’s hand, face and throne in the Quran: 7 points

The Quran states the principle before it speaks of any divine hand or face. Laysa ka-mithlihi shay’ (“There is nothing like Him”) appears in Surah al-Shura, and the short Surah al-Ikhlas ends with “and there is none comparable to Him.”^[1] Every later description has to be read under those two statements.

The verse also ends with a second clause: “and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing.” Muslim scholars noticed that the same sentence denies likeness and affirms hearing and sight. The text itself refuses both extremes, a God stripped of every attribute and a God who resembles His creation.

God asks Iblis what prevented him from prostrating to “that which I created with My two hands” (38:75). Another verse says that “all that is on earth will perish, and there remains the face of your Lord” (55:27). Musa is told he will be brought up “under My eye” (20:39), and the Merciful “rose over the Throne” (20:5, with the same verb in 7:54).^[2]

Read the way one reads a human hand, these phrases produce a body. Deleted from the text, they leave a Quran that contradicts itself. Classical scholars counted both results as errors, and the debate that followed was about where the middle sits.

Ibn Battal, quoted by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, lists the senses the Arabic verb istawa carries: to settle, to rise, to be high, to take dominion, and to complete a task. Some of them fit a created thing and some fit God. He rejects the sense of settling, because settling is a property of bodies, and he points out that the verb is also used of Noah’s company on the ark (23:28) and of riders on their mounts (43:13).^[3]

The Mutazila replaced the verb with istawla (to gain mastery). The philologist Ibn al-Araabi is reported to have refused this reading on linguistic grounds: one speaks of mastering something only when it has a rival.^[3] Ibn Hajar observes that Ibn Battal’s argument cuts both ways, and that both camps escape it through the verse “and God is ever All-Knowing, All-Wise”, which the commentators read as describing an attribute that never began.^[3]

The best-known reply comes from Malik ibn Anas. A man asked him how God rose over the Throne. Malik bowed his head until sweat covered him, then said that the Merciful rose over the Throne as He described Himself, that one does not ask how, since how is removed from Him, and that he took the questioner for an innovator and had him put out. Ibn Hajar gives this report through Abdullah ibn Wahb with a good chain. A second version, through Yahya ibn Yahya, says that affirming the rising is obligatory and asking about it is an innovation.^[4]

Al-Walid ibn Muslim put the question about these reports to al-Awzai, Malik, al-Thawri and al-Layth ibn Sad, and each told him to let them pass as they came, without asking how. Al-Shafii is reported to have affirmed God’s names and attributes while denying any likeness, by appeal to the verse in al-Shura. Sufyan ibn Uyayna said that the explanation of whatever God says of Himself is its recitation and silence about it.^[5] Al-Tirmidhi says that the jurists and scholars of the Sunni mainstream held the same view, and that the Jahmiyya rejected it as anthropomorphism.^[5]

Imam al-Haramayn al-Juwayni described the situation in his work on the creed. Some scholars interpreted these expressions, while the leading early scholars abstained from interpretation, let the words stand and entrusted their meaning to God. He chose the second path in that work, and gave a reason: if interpretation were required, the first generations would have cared about it more than they cared about the details of law.^[6]

Ibn Hajar sets out six positions. Two read the texts at face value, one by likening God to creatures and one by denying any likeness. Two affirm an attribute without taking it at face value, one by saying that God knows the intended meaning and one by interpreting the word, for example by reading hand as power. Two decline to decide whether the text names an attribute at all.^[7] Every camp starts from the same verses. They part ways at one point, which is how far an Arabic word may be read as a figure.

The first is the hadith that God created Adam “in his image” (ala suratihi), preserved by al-Bukhari and Muslim.^[8] The pronoun is the question. Ibn Hajar says the majority of scholars return it to the person who is being struck in the related saying about avoiding the face, because the command to honour the face is what the clause explains. He also reports that al-Qurtubi thought those who returned it to God had misread a transmitted paraphrase.^[9]

The second is the nightly descent, reported by Abu Hurayra, in which the Lord comes down to the nearest heaven in the last third of the night and asks who is calling, asking or seeking forgiveness.^[10] Al-Tirmidhi comments on this hadith that God is over the Throne as He has described Himself in His Book, and that more than one scholar said the same of this report and others like it.^[5] Both hadith are read under the rule that nothing is like God.

The Hebrew Bible says that on the seventh day God “rested” (Genesis 2:2), and that Adam and Eve heard “the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8).^[11] Anthropomorphic language is therefore older than Islam and is not confined to it. The question is what each tradition does with it.

The Quran answers the first picture directly. After the six days of creation it says “no fatigue touched Us” (50:38), and the verse is understood as a reply to the claim of a seventh-day rest.^[12] The Quran keeps the language of hands and face while closing the door on the weariness and the walking that Genesis allows.