The divine attributes
idea · 2 works · 3 mentions · 6 anchored passages
الصفات · al-ṣifāt · al-waṣf · attributes · neither He nor other than He · the attributes · العالم بعلم · القادر بقدرة · الوصف · بصفاته
in the texts
Risālat al-Wāridāt
The ṣifāt, the divine attributes, the classical battleground of kalām: ʻAbduh argues that since attributes are indifferent to essences, an essence can bear an attribute only if it is that attribute's source, and since there is no composition in God, His attributes are simply His essence, so that He is not perfect by something but is perfection.
to describe a thing by something requires that that thing be the source of that description, or that there be in its essence what is such a source.
(And again) Has it not become clear to you in what preceded that the loci in which the contingents appear are the talisman (*ṭilsam*) of His essence and His attributes?
otherwise it would follow that it is qualified by all attributes, and that there is preponderance without a determinant.
Bayān zaghl al-ʻilm wa-al-ṭalab
The attributes of God, an article of the forebears' creed, the object of the theologians' partial affirmations and denials, and the subject of a whole polemical literature.
And the uṣūlī who affirms some of the attributes and denies others and interprets figuratively in places — they call him self-contradictory.
[23] appears from their books on the attributes, on divine unity, on the refutation of the Jahmīyah, on the censure of kalām and on the Sunnah, and from what they have composed on the criticism of transmitters.