Bila Kayfa Between Two Errors

Scripture repeatedly ascribes to God things that, read plainly, sound like a body: a hand, a face, a throne he sits upon. Early Muslim theologians divided sharply over what to do with this language. One camp took the words at face value and accepted that God possesses, in some sense, the features described, an anthropomorphism that troubled thinkers committed to God's absolute difference from anything created. A second camp went the other way, treating every such phrase as pure metaphor to be reinterpreted until nothing bodily remained in it at all. The traditionist position, later given its classic formulation within Ashari theology, tried to hold a narrower line between the two. It affirms the words of scripture exactly as revealed, without either denying that God truly has a hand or a face in the sense scripture uses those words, and without ascribing to God any resemblance to a created hand or face. The formula for this stance is bila kayfa, without asking how, meaning that the manner of the attribute is left consciously unexplained rather than either literalised or explained away. Later theological vocabulary gave each rejected camp its own name: tashbih or tajsim for the anthropomorphism that likens God to a created body, and tatil for the opposite error of stripping God's attributes of real meaning until nothing remains to affirm.