A Refutation of Salafi-Wahhabi Anthropomorphism: A Quranic Perspective
V.A. Mohamad Ashrof, New Age Islam
21 May 2026
This paper presents a systematic, evidence-based refutation of the Salafi-Wahhabi theological project insofar as it advances a literalist, anthropomorphic conception of God. Drawing upon the internal resources of the Quran itself, the classical Islamic scholarly tradition, comparative philosophy, modern linguistics, cognitive science, and physics. The paper concludes by articulating a constructive, scientifically coherent, and Quranically grounded theology of divine transcendence that preserves the intellectual integrity of Islam while speaking meaningfully to contemporary philosophical, scientific, and ethical discourse.
Defining the Problem
The theological tradition known as Salafiyya or Wahhabiyya - the two terms being functionally inseparable in their dominant contemporary expressions - has made a distinctive creedal commitment to the literal affirmation of divine attributes as they appear in the Quran and authenticated hadith. This school, tracing its theological lineage through Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), his student Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1350), and its modern institutionalisation through Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) and the scholarly apparatus of Saudi Arabia, insists that descriptions of God's "hand," "face," "shin," "foot," "eyes," and "settling upon the throne" (istiwa) must be affirmed "without asking how" (bi-la kayf) and "without resemblance to creation" (bi-la tashbih).
The problem is that this position, as it is actually practised and preached, does not in fact avoid tashbih (resemblance). It merely defers it. When someone says "God has two hands that are both right hands, but not like human right hands," the word "not like" is doing enormous and unexamined work. The question immediately arises: in what sense are they "hands" at all, if they bear no intelligible relationship whatsoever to the only hands about which we have any concept? The Salafi-Wahhabi position oscillates, often within a single paragraph, between asserting that the meaning is known ("hands means hands") and that the modality is unknown ("not like our hands"). This is not a coherent position; it is an evasion that satisfies neither rigorous theology nor honest linguistics.
Moreover, the political and social context in which this school operates is inseparable from its theological content. The aggressive promotion of Salafi-Wahhabi theology, backed by enormous petrodollar resources, has created a climate in which scholars who apply rational and metaphorical interpretation (ta'wil) to Quranic anthropomorphisms are labelled deviants, innovators (mubtadi'un), or even apostates. This is not a minor academic dispute. It has material consequences for the lives of Muslim scholars, communities, and individuals across the globe.
This paper does not rest upon the arguments of any single theological school. Instead, it marshals evidence from the Quran itself, from the history of Islamic jurisprudence and theology, from Arabic linguistics, from the comparative study of religion, from modern science, and from the philosophical tradition to make the case that literalist anthropomorphism in Islamic theology is (a) textually unsupported, (b) internally contradictory, (c) methodologically dishonest, and (d) harmful to the intellectual and spiritual flourishing of the Muslim community and of humanity's engagement with Islamic thought.
The Quranic Mandate for Divine Transcendence
The foundational Quranic statement on the nature of God is found in Surah Al-Ikhlas (112:1-4): "Say: He is God, the One. God, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born. Nor is there to Him any equivalent." This chapter, which the Prophet described as equivalent to one-third of the Quran in spiritual weight, is explicitly and categorically anti-anthropomorphic. The denial that God "begets or is born" is not merely a polemic against Trinitarian Christianity or pagan Arabian polytheism; it is a categorical rejection of biological categories as applicable to the Divine. To beget and to be born are thermodynamic, evolutionary, and metabolic processes. They belong to the creaturely order. God is declared to be outside that order entirely.
The second governing text is Quran 42:11: "There is nothing like unto Him, and He is the Hearing, the Seeing." The Arabic "laysa kamithlihi shay'" is linguistically as absolute as any statement can be. "Shay'" (thing) covers every conceivable entity - material or immaterial, actual or potential. The verse does not say "nothing created is like Him" or "nothing human is like Him." It says nothing - full stop - is like Him. This must function as the hermeneutical key to all other Quranic language about God. Any verse that seems to attribute a human-like quality to God must be read in light of this absolute negation.
The Salafi-Wahhabi school acknowledges 42:11 as a proof text but then proceeds as though it governs only questions of essence (dhat) rather than also governing descriptions of attributes (sifat). This is an arbitrary and textually unwarranted distinction. The verse makes no such subdivision. It says nothing is like Him, period.
The Quran itself provides hermeneutical guidance on how to handle its own ambiguous passages. Quran 3:7 states: "It is He who has sent down to you the Book; in it are verses that are precise - they are the foundation of the Book - and others are ambiguous. As for those in whose hearts is deviation, they follow that of it which is ambiguous, seeking discord and seeking an interpretation. And no one knows its [true] interpretation except God."
This verse identifies a category of verses called mutashabihat - allegorical, ambiguous, or figurative passages - and explicitly warns against treating them as the foundation of doctrine. The verses describing God's "hand," "face," "shin," and "settling on the throne" are, by the consensus of classical scholars, precisely of this category. The Quran therefore explicitly instructs believers not to base creedal positions primarily on these texts.
The Salafi-Wahhabi school inverts this Quranic instruction. It places these mutashabihat at the centre of its creed, elevates them above the muhkamat (the clear, unambiguous verses), and then accuses of deviation precisely those scholars who follow the Quranic instruction to exercise caution and interpretive restraint.
Quran 6:103 states: "No vision can grasp Him, but His Grasp is over all vision. And He is the Subtle, the Acquainted." This verse categorically states that human vision - or any faculty of perception - cannot encompass God. This is not a statement about contingent limitations but an ontological claim about the nature of God. If God cannot be grasped by vision, He cannot be visualised. If He cannot be visualised, attributing to Him a describable form or shape - even "in a manner that befits His majesty" - is already a concession to the imagination that this verse forecloses.
The hadith reports in Sahih Bukhari that describe God as appearing on the Day of Judgement in "a form other than the one they had seen Him in" raise exactly the problem that classical scholars identified: if God changes form, then God is subject to change, and change is a property of contingent beings, not of the Eternal. The Salafi-Wahhabi apologists who affirm these hadiths literally must either (a) accept that God's essence undergoes change, which contradicts divine perfection, or (b) acknowledge that the language is metaphorical - which is precisely the ta'wil they profess to reject.
The word "yad" (hand) appears nine times in the Quran in relation to God. A survey of these usages demonstrates overwhelming contextual evidence for metaphorical intent:
"The hand of God is over their hands" (48:10) - this is in the context of the Pledge of Ridwan, where people were physically pledging allegiance through physical handshakes. God did not literally place a physical hand atop the hands of thousands of people. The verse signifies divine sanction and presence over the pledge.
"Both His hands are extended" (5:64) - this verse responds to the Jewish claim that God is "tight-fisted." The entire passage is manifestly about divine generosity and provision. "Both hands are extended" is an Arabic idiom for open-handed generosity, just as "tight-fisted" is an idiom for miserliness. No Arabic speaker of the seventh century would have taken this as a literal anatomical description.
"What Our hands have made" (36:71) - this verse refers to livestock. If "hands" here carries the same literal weight that the Salafi-Wahhabi school assigns to "hands" in 38:75, then cattle have a special distinction over other animals because they were created by the divine hands. This is absurd on its face and no Salafi scholar has seriously argued it.
"And the sky, We built it with hands" (51:47) - the three major Saudi-sponsored English translations of the Quran (Sahih International, Muhsin Khan and Muhammed Al-Hilali, and Yusuf Ali's Saudi edition of 1985) all translate this verse as "with strength" or "with power" - not "with hands." This is a tacit admission by the very translators who represent the Salafi-Wahhabi tradition that even they do not consistently apply their own literalism. When "hands" would imply something theologically inconvenient - like God having used His hands to build the sky just as a craftsman uses his hands - they quietly resort to ta'wil. This is the height of methodological inconsistency.
"And remember Our servants Ibrahim and Ishaq and Yaqoub, men who possessed hands and vision" (38:45) - virtually every translation under the sun renders "hands" here as "power" or "strength." The Quran itself thus provides internal evidence that "hands" can and does function as an idiom for power or capacity.
Linguistic Analysis: Arabic Idiom and the Limits of Literalism
Classical Arabic is one of the world's richest and most figuratively dense languages. The tradition of Arabic rhetoric (balaghah) identifies an enormous array of figurative devices: metaphor (istiara), metonymy (kinaya), synecdoche, allegory (tamthil), and many more. Arab poets and scholars of the classical period were exquisitely sensitive to the distinction between haqiqa (literal meaning) and majaz (figurative meaning). The very scholars who compiled and transmitted the hadith literature - people like Imam Malik, Imam al-Bukhari, Imam Muslim - were native or near-native speakers of Arabic who understood this distinction instinctively.
The Salafi-Wahhabi school's insistence on reading descriptions of God's attributes in their literal (haqiqi) sense against the dominant figurative usage of the same words elsewhere in the Quran and in classical Arabic literature represents not fidelity to the Arabic language but ignorance of it - or, more charitably, a selective application of linguistic principle that serves a predetermined theological conclusion.
The Quran states: "Everything will perish except His face (wajh)" (28:88) and "The face of your Lord will remain, possessor of majesty and honour" (55:27). On a Salafi-Wahhabi literalist reading, God possesses a face as a real divine attribute. But this immediately raises the problem: if only His face survives the annihilation of all things, what happens to His other attributes - His hands, His shin, His eyes? Do they perish?
Ibn Taymiyya recognised this problem acutely. He applied ta'wil to resolve it, interpreting "face" (wajh) as meaning "direction" (jiha) - so that the verse means "everything will perish save that by which God's direction is sought." He then claimed that "this is what the vast majority of the Salaf have said."
This is a devastating self-disclosure. Ibn Taymiyya, the founding authority of the Athari-Salafi approach, applied precisely the ta'wil he elsewhere condemns in order to resolve an internal contradiction in his own position. And he attributed this ta'wil to "the vast majority of the Salaf" - meaning that, by his own testimony, the early Muslim community routinely applied metaphorical interpretation to Quranic anthropomorphisms when literal reading produced incoherence. One of only two conclusions can follow: either the Salaf applied ta'wil (in which case the Salafi-Wahhabi prohibition on ta'wil has no basis in the Salaf), or the Salaf understood "wajh" to mean something non-anatomical in its Arabic usage (in which case they were applying the kind of linguistic sophistication that opens the door for exactly the kind of interpretive work that Ash'ari and Maturidi scholars do).
Either way, the Salafi-Wahhabi position is internally refuted by the words of its own principal authority.
Quran 7:57 describes the winds as heralds "between the two hands of His mercy." On a literalist reading, God's attribute of Mercy possesses two hands. The Salafi-Wahhabi interpreter who insists on real, literal hands for God must now decide whether the attribute of Mercy also has two real, literal hands, and whether those hands are also both right hands. The position leads not to theological clarity but to theological absurdity.
The phrase "between the two hands of" (bayna yaday) is a well-documented Arabic idiom meaning "before" or "in front of." It appears throughout classical Arabic poetry and prose with no anatomical implication whatsoever. To insist on literalism here requires ignoring fourteen centuries of Arabic literary scholarship.
The creedal claim that God has two hands and that "both of His hands are right hands" is derived from a hadith reported in Sahih Muslim. The full text reads as follows: "Abdullah ibn Umar reported Allah's Messenger saying: Allah, the Exalted and Glorious, would fold the Heavens on the Day of Judgement and then He would place them on His right hand and say: I am the Lord; where are the haughty and where are the proud today? He would fold the earth placing it on the left hand and say: I am the Lord; where are the haughty and where are the proud today?" (Muslim 2788)
Note: God places the heavens on His right hand and the earth on His left hand. The hadith as attributed to the Prophet explicitly describes a left hand.
The additional phrase "and both of His hands are right hands" does not appear as part of the Prophet's speech in this narration. It is, as the source itself indicates, a statement made by Muhammad, one of the sub-narrators in the chain of transmission, as his own gloss on the hadith. This is the classic definition of an interpolation (idraj or mudraj) - an addition by a reporter to the text of the hadith being narrated.
In hadith methodology, a mudraj addition cannot be attributed to the Prophet. It is not the word of the Prophet. It is the opinion of a sub-narrator. The Salafi-Wahhabi establishment has elevated what is demonstrably a sub-narrator's personal theological anxiety - his discomfort with the idea that God might have a left hand - to the status of creedal dogma. This is methodologically indefensible on the very terms of the hadith sciences that this school claims to uphold with uniquely rigorous authority.
Furthermore, the sub-narrator's interpolation itself reveals a guilty theological conscience. He could not simply let the Prophet's words pass. He felt compelled to add a clarification that "both hands are right hands." This compulsion is itself evidence that the sub-narrator was engaged in theological speculation (zann) about God - which is precisely what the Quran warns against: "Do you say things about God that you do not know?" (7:28).
The Salafi-Wahhabi creed regarding divine hands creates an additional problem of arithmetic. The school asserts that God has two hands and that both of these hands are right hands. But Quran 7:57 uses the phrase "two hands of His Mercy," which, if taken literally, gives the attribute of Mercy two additional hands. The wind is sent before these two hands of Mercy. If we are counting literally, we now have four hands attributable to God or to His attributes.
The Salafi-Wahhabi creed as actually taught by its major scholars includes the following simultaneous commitments: (1) God has two hands; (2) both hands are right hands; (3) one of those right hands is a left hand (since the hadith in Sahih Muslim says the earth goes on the left hand); and (4) the wind is sent before two additional hands of God's attribute of Mercy. This is not theology. It is arithmetic incoherence dressed in pious language.
A cluster of hadiths in Sahih Bukhari describes God as appearing on the Day of Judgement in "a form other than the one they had seen Him in" and later appearing "in a form they know." Several acute theological problems arise from a literal reading of these reports:
First, if God appears in a form that changes, then God's essence (dhat) is subject to change. Change is a property of contingent beings - things that come into existence and pass away. An eternal, uncaused being cannot change form, because a change in form is a temporal event, and temporal events require causes. A God who changes form is not the God of Islamic theology; He is a much more limited deity.
Second, the text implies that those present will recognise God by a known form - suggesting they have seen this form before. But if believers and non-believers alike recognise God's form on the Day of Judgement because they have seen it previously, when and how did they see it? The literalist is forced to say that God has appeared in a recognisable physical form to the entire believing and unbelieving community at some prior point. This has never been claimed by any mainstream Islamic scholar, Salafi or otherwise.
Third, when classical scholars who take these hadiths seriously were pressed on exactly these points, they acknowledged that they could not produce from the Quran or the verified Sunnah any description of the divine form that would enable believers to recognise it on the Day of Judgement. Their argument collapsed precisely where it needed to be most robust.
The rational resolution - that these hadiths employ the imagery of divine manifestation and recognition in a way that is metaphorical, conveying the reality of encountering God's presence and truth rather than describing a visual-anatomical event - is far more consistent with both the text of the hadiths and the governing Quranic principle that no vision can encompass God (6:103).
In his work Al-Aqida al-Wasitiyya, Ibn Taymiyya explains God's statement "He is with you wherever you are" (57:4) as follows: "The moon, one of the smallest of Allah's creations, is both placed in the heaven and present with the traveller and the non-traveller wherever they may be. And the Exalted is above the Throne, as a watchful guardian of His creatures."
This is a comparison of God's omnipresence to the moon. Let that sink in. The scholar who condemns ta'wil, who condemns allegorical interpretation, who condemns any attempt to explain divine attributes through analogies with created things - this very scholar has compared the presence of God to the presence of moonlight.
The comparison is not merely bold; it is deeply flawed on its own terms. The moon occupies a specific orbit. The moon is dependent on a gravitational relationship with the Earth and the Sun. The moon's light does not penetrate ocean depths. The moon is a finite physical body subject to all the laws of thermodynamics. To compare God's omnipresence to the moon's light is to apply to God precisely the kind of creaturely analogy that Ibn Taymiyya's own creed, in his own words in the very same work, declares to be forbidden.
In Al-Aqida al-Wasitiyya itself, Ibn Taymiyya writes: "They (Ahl al-Sunnah) do not make the resemblance between His Attributes and the attributes of the creation, because, for Him, Glorified is He, there is no comparison, nor equal, nor partner, and there is no analogy for Him with His creation." And yet, in the same work and attributed to the same author, he compares God to the moon.
The Salafi-Wahhabi establishment, when confronted with this, typically responds that Ibn Taymiyya was using the moon as an analogy for the purposes of teaching, not as a literal theological claim. But this is precisely the defence that Ash'ari and Maturidi scholars offer for their use of interpretive and analogical tools - and which the Salafi-Wahhabi school does not accept from them. The double standard is manifest.
As noted above, Ibn Taymiyya applied ta'wil to the word "wajh" (face) in Quran 28:88, interpreting it as "direction" rather than anatomical face. He did so because a literal reading produced the theological absurdity of God's face persisting while His other attributes perished. He even attributed this ta'wil to "the vast majority of the Salaf."
The logical implication is inescapable. If Ibn Taymiyya can apply ta'wil when literal reading produces incoherence, and if he can attribute this practice to the Salaf, then ta'wil is a legitimate tool within the Athari tradition itself. The Salafi-Wahhabi prohibition on ta'wil is therefore not a principle derived consistently from the methodology of the Salaf; it is a selective rhetorical weapon deployed against theological opponents while being quietly retained for domestic use.
In numerous hadith reports where the Prophet speaks of God's attributes, there is not a single authenticated narration in which the Prophet adds the disclaimer "in a manner that befits His majesty" or "unlike His creation." These phrases, which are so central to the Salafi-Wahhabi formula of bi-la kayf, are not found in the text of any hadith. They were added by later scholars - including Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal and others in the tradition - precisely because those scholars recognised that raw attribution of human-like qualities to God required qualification.
This is an important admission. The very disclaimer that the Salafi-Wahhabi school uses to avoid the charge of anthropomorphism ("we say God has hands, but not like our hands") is itself an innovation (bid'ah) in the technical sense - it was not said by the Prophet and was added by later scholars. If adding such a disclaimer is permissible for Imam Ahmad, then the broader project of qualifying and contextualising Quranic anthropomorphisms - which is what ta'wil consists of - must also be permissible. The line the Salafi-Wahhabi school draws between its own disclaimers (permissible) and Ash'ari ta'wil (heretical) is entirely arbitrary.
The Historical Record: Mujassimah, Mushabbihah, and Political Theology
The history of Islamic theology contains numerous examples of groups who took anthropomorphic descriptions of God literally and were condemned for it by the mainstream scholarly community. Hisham ibn Hakim (d. 796) claimed that God had a physical form. The Karramiyya, founded by Muhammad ibn Karram (d. 869), held that God is a physical entity seated upon the Throne. Both of these positions were rejected by Sunni, Mu'tazili, and Ash'ari scholars as violations of divine transcendence.
The Hanbali school of thought, which forms one genealogical root of the contemporary Salafi-Wahhabi tradition, was historically associated with popular anthropomorphist tendencies among its followers, even if the Hanbali legal school as such does not formally endorse corporealism. The city of Baghdad remained a stronghold of Hanbalite approaches to anthropomorphism until the Mongol devastation of 1258. Contemporary Salafi-Wahhabi scholars reject the label of Mujassimah (corporealists) and insist that their bi-la kayf formula prevents them from falling into anthropomorphism. But as the foregoing analysis has demonstrated, their position does not escape anthropomorphism - it merely defers it through the device of an unexamined disclaimer.
The terms Mujassimah and Mushabbihah have, throughout Islamic history, been used as much for political purposes as for genuine theological discrimination. Rulers and religious establishments accused opponents of anthropomorphism to discredit them and consolidate theological authority. This does not mean the theological distinctions are unreal - they are very real - but it does mean that the history of these disputes must be read with attention to the power dynamics at play.
The contemporary Salafi-Wahhabi establishment, funded primarily by the oil wealth of the Gulf states, has deployed the converse political strategy: it has used accusations of ta'til (negation of God's attributes) and ilhad (heresy) against its Ash'ari and Maturidi critics in order to marginalise them and consolidate control over Sunni theological discourse. This is the same use of theological labelling as a political weapon that earlier rulers and establishments deployed, only directed from the opposite direction.
Khaled Abou El-Fadl has argued persuasively that "puritanical Salafism projected the limitations of the physical world onto God, thereby restricting the potentialities offered by divinity. The tendency toward anthropomorphism in puritan beliefs is a symptom of this problem." The symptom is not merely theological; it is political, reflecting a desire to control and delimit the divine in ways that serve human - specifically clerical and state - authority.
The Mu'tazilite theological school, which flourished from the eighth to the tenth centuries, developed the method of ta'wil specifically to address Quranic anthropomorphisms, driven by their strong commitment to divine transcendence and their immersion in Greek philosophical thought. They argued that a "created" Quran could be interpreted, whereas an "uncreated" Quran could only be applied directly. Their method of allegorical interpretation influenced not only subsequent Muslim theologians but also Rabbanite and Karaite Jews, Coptic Christians, and Shi'ite scholars in the ninth and tenth centuries.
The Mu'tazilites were eventually suppressed by the Abbasid caliphate - ironically, after they had earlier used political power to persecute those who refused to affirm the created nature of the Quran. Their suppression does not vindicate their political behaviour, but it also does not invalidate their theological insights. The Ash'ari and Maturidi schools, which became the mainstream of Sunni theology, retained the Mu'tazilite commitment to divine transcendence and the validity of rational interpretation whilst modifying other aspects of Mu'tazilite doctrine. This synthesis is not a deviation from Islamic thought; it is the central achievement of Islamic theological reasoning.
The Ash'ari-Maturidi Counter-Position
The Ash'ari and Maturidi schools together represent the dominant theological tradition of mainstream Sunni Islam across fourteen centuries and across the geographic breadth of the Muslim world - from Morocco to Indonesia, from Central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. These schools were not peripheral academic exercises; they were the theological frameworks within which the great majority of Islamic scholarship, law, spirituality, and culture developed.
Both schools affirm divine attributes as real whilst insisting on their absolute incomparability with creaturely attributes. They hold that God's "hand" signifies divine power and generosity, that God's "face" signifies divine essence and eternal presence, and that God's "settling upon the throne" signifies divine sovereignty over all creation. This is not denial of the attributes (ta'til); it is affirmation of the attributes in a manner consistent with the governing principle of 42:11.
Classical Ash'ari-Maturidi theology rests on three interlocking principles:
Tanzih (Divine Incomparability): God is absolutely free from any resemblance to created beings. No attribute of God can be understood through direct analogy with creaturely experience. God's "knowledge" is not like human knowledge; God's "power" is not like human power; God's "speech" is not like human speech; and God's "hand," if affirmed, is not like a human hand in any meaningful anatomical sense.
Bi-la kayf (Without Modality): Divine attributes are affirmed as they appear in the Quran and authentic hadith, but their precise nature or mode of subsistence is not enquired into. This is not agnosticism; it is epistemic humility. Human concepts are formed from creaturely experience and are therefore categorically inadequate to the divine reality.
Tawhid (Divine Unity): God's essence, attributes, and actions are absolutely singular. There is no composition in God, no division between His knowledge and His will, no tension between His mercy and His justice. The unity of God means that all attributes are ways of speaking about one undivided divine reality.
These three principles together produce a theology that is intellectually rigorous, spiritually profound, and resistant to the idolatrous tendency to reduce God to a super-human being with very large muscles and a very long beard.
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), perhaps the most influential single theologian in the history of Islam, employed the principle of ta'wil to reconcile revelation with rational thought. He asserted that metaphorical readings prevent contradictions within the theological enterprise and that the alternative - naive literalism - produces a God who is not only anthropomorphic but philosophically incoherent.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210), one of the greatest exegetes (mufassirin) in Islamic history, systematically applied rational and contextual principles to Quranic interpretation, consistently interpreting anthropomorphic passages in ways that preserved divine transcendence. His monumental commentary Mafatih al-Ghayb remains one of the most authoritative works of Quranic exegesis.
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), the great historian and sociologist, explicitly affirmed the Ash'ari approach to divine attributes as the mainstream of Sunni thought, treating literalist corporealism as a sectarian deviation.
The claim, widespread in Salafi-Wahhabi literature, that ta'wil is an innovation introduced by speculative theologians who lacked grounding in the tradition is straightforwardly false. Ta'wil, understood as the responsible application of linguistic, contextual, and rational principles to ambiguous texts, was practised by the Companions, the Successors, and the great scholars of the classical period. Ibn Taymiyya himself, as we have seen, could not avoid it.
Science, Consciousness, and Why Person-God Models Collapse
Modern cognitive science of religion provides a powerful explanatory account of why human beings are systematically disposed to anthropomorphism - to the attribution of personality, intention, and human-like qualities to natural phenomena and to ultimate reality. Justin Barrett's research demonstrates that human minds possess what he calls a "hyperactive agency detection device" (HADD) - an evolved cognitive mechanism that attributes intentionality and personhood to patterns in the environment. This mechanism was evolutionarily adaptive: it is safer to mistake wind rustling in the bushes for a predator than to mistake a predator for wind. But it also generates systematic cognitive biases when human beings reflect on ultimate reality.
The important implication for theology is this: anthropomorphism about God is what we would expect given human cognitive architecture, regardless of whether God is actually person-like. The prevalence of anthropomorphic God-concepts across human cultures and religious traditions is therefore not evidence that God is actually anthropomorphic; it is evidence that human minds are built to generate anthropomorphic representations. Elevating this cognitive tendency to a theological principle - saying that our anthropomorphic intuitions are revelatory rather than cognitive artefacts - is a category error of the first order.
Barrett's research further shows that even theologians who intellectually affirm divine transcendence unconsciously revert to anthropomorphic models in their practical reasoning - imagining God as having beliefs, making sequential decisions, attending to prayers in time, and having a spatial location. This cognitive default is precisely what sophisticated theological reasoning in the tradition of tanzih is designed to counteract.
Modern neuroscience reveals that consciousness - the inner subjective experience of being an aware self - is an emergent property of biological neural systems. Approximately 86 billion neurons forming around 100 trillion synaptic connections, consuming approximately 20 per cent of the body's metabolic energy, give rise to the phenomenon of conscious experience. Consciousness requires sensory inputs that distinguish self from environment, temporal sequencing through memory and anticipation, embodiment as the medium through which experience is processed, and an evolutionary history in which consciousness served survival functions.
If God is not biological, has no body, is not temporally bounded, and has no evolutionary history, then God cannot possess consciousness as we understand it. To attribute consciousness to God is to project a biological phenomenon onto non-biological reality - precisely the kind of category error that the Quranic principle of tanzih is designed to prevent. This does not mean God lacks what consciousness gestures towards - awareness, responsiveness, intelligence, presence - but it does mean that the human concept of "consciousness" is entirely inadequate to describe whatever God's awareness is like.
Classical theology conceived God as a supreme substance - a being with maximal properties, existing independently and permanently. This framework derives from Aristotelian metaphysics, in which substance is the primary ontological category. But contemporary physics has systematically dismantled substance ontology. Quantum field theory demonstrates that what we perceive as discrete "particles" are excitations of underlying quantum fields; there are no independently existing, persistent "things" at the fundamental level of physical reality - only patterns of energy, information, and relation. As physicist Carlo Rovelli articulates: "The world is not made of things; it is made of events, processes, and relations."
If the fundamental nature of physical reality is relational and processual rather than substantial, then modelling God as a "supreme substance" - an entity with definite properties including a body with two right hands - misunderstands not only God but also the nature of reality. The Quranic description of God as Al-Haqq (The Real, The Truth) points in the direction of ontological depth rather than substantial existence. God is not one more entity in the universe; God is the ground of there being a universe at all.
Physicist Paul Davies, noting the astonishing precision of the universe's fundamental constants - the strong nuclear force, the cosmological constant, the ratio of electromagnetic to gravitational force - observes that "the universe in some sense knew we were coming." Not through literal foresight by a Person-God, but through an intrinsic lawfulness and fecundity that generates complexity, life, and consciousness from inert matter. The universe's constants are fine-tuned to approximately one part in 10 to the power of 120 in the case of the cosmological constant. This is not a brute fact but an invitation to theological reflection.
A scientifically informed Islamic theology does not interpret this fine-tuning as evidence for a divine engineer who sits outside the universe and adjusts parameters. Rather, it interprets the universe's ordered rationality as an expression of divine wisdom - the meaning of the Quranic name Al-Hakim (The Wise). God is not a person who designed the universe as a craftsman designs a chair; God is the reason there is ordered, intelligible, generative reality rather than nothing. This is a conception of God that the Quran supports, that contemporary science illuminates, and that naive anthropomorphism systematically obscures.
Process Theology and Panentheism as Quranic Models
The theologian Paul Tillich famously defined God as the "Ground of Being" - not a being among beings, but Being-Itself (esse ipsum), the source from which all particular beings derive. This formulation avoids both the anthropomorphism of Person-God models and the cold abstraction of deism. God is not an entity that exists alongside or above the universe; God is the ontological depth of reality itself, the "why" behind the fact that there is something rather than nothing.
This conception resonates powerfully with the Quranic name Al-Qayyum - the Self-Subsisting, the One upon Whom all else depends for its existence. If everything that exists depends upon God for its being, and if God depends upon nothing for His being, then God is precisely what Tillich means by Being-Itself. God is not a being; God is the being of beings. This is not a foreign import into Islamic theology; it is the explicit implication of Quranic theology, articulated with philosophical rigour by scholars like Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd and developed by contemporary thinkers drawing on the full range of intellectual resources available to them.
Classical theism holds that God is wholly transcendent, wholly other, externally related to creation. Pantheism identifies God with nature. Panentheism - meaning "all-in-God" - proposes that the world exists within God while God transcends the world. God is more than the universe, yet the universe exists within the divine life.
This model aligns with several powerful Quranic affirmations. "We are closer to him than his jugular vein" (50:16) - God is not distant but constitutes the ontological depth of the human person. "He is with you wherever you are" (57:4) - divine presence is not spatial proximity but ontological immanence. "To God belongs the East and the West; wherever you turn, there is the face of God" (2:115) - divine presence is not located in a direction but is the very reality within which all directions exist.
None of these verses requires that God be a person with consciousness, hands, and a face sitting on a literal throne in a literal direction above a literal sky. They require that God be present, responsive, and intimately involved in every dimension of created reality. A panentheist model, in which the universe exists within God as a finite expression of infinite divine creativity, honours these Quranic affirmations whilst remaining consistent with both divine transcendence and contemporary scientific understanding.
Process theology, developed by Alfred North Whitehead and refined by Charles Hartshorne, conceives God as the primordial creative potentiality and the consequent integration of all actuality. God is not static perfection but dynamic engagement - the lure toward novelty, complexity, and value in every moment of creaturely experience. This process conception of God as continuously creative and responsive resonates with the Quranic name Al-Badi' - The Originator, The Innovator - which implies continuous creative originality rather than a one-time act of creation after which God sits enthroned above a finished product.
The Quran's description of God as continuously sustaining all existence - "He is not wearied by their preservation" (2:255) - is precisely the conception of an active, sustaining, involved divine creativity that process theology articulates. The universe is not a machine built and set running by an absent engineer; it is a continuously created expression of divine generative power, held in being from moment to moment by the sustaining act of the divine will.
The Humanistic Stakes: Anthropomorphism and Human Dignity
The debate over divine anthropomorphism is not merely an academic theological exercise. It has profound consequences for human self-understanding and for the ethical treatment of human beings.
When God is conceived in anthropomorphic terms - as a supremely powerful person with human-like qualities, preferences, and emotional responses - theology inevitably reflects the limitations, prejudices, and power arrangements of the human communities that produce it. A God modelled on a powerful human ruler will reflect the values of a ruling class. A God who whistles, smells roasting meat, and gets angry at disobedience will be deployed in the service of social control. The history of religious violence, inquisitions, and crusades is substantially a history of human beings projecting their own tribal loyalties, fears, and power ambitions onto a deity conceived in sufficiently human terms to serve those purposes.
Zulfiqar Ali Shah makes the point with surgical precision: "A crude, anthropomorphic or corporeal notion of God is a great hurdle standing between modern intellectual thought and belief in God. It has weakened the authority of religion and, at worst, annihilated it. Anthropomorphic and corporeal concepts of the Divine are among the leading factors behind modern atheism." The contemporary crisis of faith in Western societies is partly a crisis produced by the failure of anthropomorphic theology to maintain intellectual credibility in the face of modern scientific and philosophical understanding. A theology that insists God has two hands and sits on a literal throne is not merely intellectually implausible; it is an obstacle to authentic faith.
The Quran presents a vision of human dignity that does not depend on anthropomorphic theology. Human beings are described as God's "vicegerents on earth" (khalifah, 2:30), as recipients of a divine trust (amanah) entrusted to no other creature (33:72), as beings honoured above much of creation (17:70). The angels were commanded to bow before Adam - not because Adam physically resembles God, but because the human person is the bearer of divine trust, divine knowledge, and divine moral capacity.
This Quranic humanism is grounded not in the idea that God looks like a human being, but in the idea that human beings bear a unique responsibility, dignity, and moral capacity within creation. Mustafa Akyol observes that "while the Quran indeed does not define humans as created in the image of God, it does describe them, repeatedly, as God's vicegerents on earth. It also tells that God commanded angels to bow down before Adam, and that the latter received a divine trust given to no other creature. From such Quranic precepts one can infer a view of human dignity."
This is a humanism grounded in divine command and cosmic responsibility, not in a physical resemblance between the human body and a divine body. It is a more robust, more universal, and more philosophically defensible basis for human dignity than anything that anthropomorphic theology can provide.
The Salafi-Wahhabi theological tradition, with its insistence on a very concrete, bodily, literally-enthroned God, has shown consistent difficulty in engaging sympathetically with the full range of human diversity and complexity. When God is conceived as a powerful, masculine, enthroned sovereign who issues commands that must be obeyed without rational scrutiny, the social and political consequences tend to be authoritarian, hierarchical, and resistant to reform.
A theology of divine transcendence - in which God is the Ground of Being, the creative principle of order and love immanent in all reality, the source of moral intelligibility rather than a source of arbitrary commands - provides the basis for a very different kind of social and political engagement. It grounds human rights in the divine gift of reason and moral capacity rather than in tribal membership. It supports rational inquiry rather than suppressing it. It promotes dialogue and compassion rather than condemnation and exclusion. The stakes of the anthropomorphism debate are therefore not merely theological; they are political, social, and ultimately humanitarian.
Tawhid for the Modern Age
The foregoing analysis has established the following conclusions:
First, the Quranic principle of divine incomparability (42:11) is the governing hermeneutical principle for all other Quranic language about God. Any interpretation of Quranic anthropomorphisms that produces a God who has describable physical attributes is inconsistent with this governing principle and therefore inconsistent with the Quran's own self-interpretation.
Second, the Salafi-Wahhabi creedal claim that God has two hands "both of which are right hands" is derived from an interpolated addition (mudraj) to a hadith in Sahih Muslim, not from the authenticated words of the Prophet. The hadith itself explicitly describes God placing the earth on His left hand. The interpolation reflects a sub-narrator's theological anxiety, not prophetic teaching. Elevating a sub-narrator's opinion to creedal status is a methodological violation of the very hadith sciences the Salafi-Wahhabi school claims to uphold.
Third, Ibn Taymiyya, the principal authority of the Athari-Salafi school, applied ta'wil when literal reading produced theological incoherence (as with "wajh" in 28:88), compared God to the moon (a manifestly creaturely analogy), and attributed this practice to "the vast majority of the Salaf." This internal contradiction fatally undermines the claim that the Athari-Salafi school uniquely represents the method of the early Muslims.
Fourth, biblical anthropomorphism demonstrates, by way of instructive contrast, what consistent literalism produces: a God with nostrils, wings, feathers, and a capacity to be cheered by wine. The methodology the Salafi-Wahhabi school uses to affirm Quranic anthropomorphisms, if applied to the Bible, produces results that the same school correctly identifies as theologically untenable.
Fifth, modern cognitive science reveals anthropomorphism as a cognitive bias built into human neural architecture by evolutionary history, not as a theological revelation. Sanctifying anthropomorphism is to mistake the mechanism of human cognition for divine self-disclosure.
Sixth, the great tradition of Sunni Islamic theology - as represented by the Ash'ari and Maturidi schools, by scholars from Al-Ghazali and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi to Ibn Khaldun and beyond - consistently affirmed divine transcendence through the tools of linguistic analysis, rational interpretation, and contextual reading. This is not a deviation from classical Islam; it is classical Islam.
What remains, then, is to articulate what a positive, constructive theology of divine transcendence looks like - one that is faithful to the Quranic insistence on divine incomparability, coherent within the framework of contemporary scientific knowledge, and productive of the kind of humanistic, compassionate, rationally serious engagement with reality that the Quran demands of its readers.
God - the God of the Quran, the God of the great Islamic theological tradition - is not a being with two right hands enthroned above the seventh sky in a literal empyrean. God is the reason there is something rather than nothing; the ground of ordered, intelligible, fecund reality; the creative potentiality from which the universe continuously unfolds; the depth of being within which every human heart is closer than its jugular vein; the Sustaining One upon Whom all things depend without dependence on anything in return; the Wise One whose rationality is written into the fundamental constants of physics; the Merciful One whose mercy, as the hadith says, was written over His very throne before the creation of the universe.
This is Tawhid. Not the Tawhid of two right hands and a literal shin unveiled on the Day of Judgement. But the Tawhid that the great opening chapter of the Quran proclaims when it calls God "the Lord of all worlds" - not the Lord of this particular tribal group, not the Lord of a specific geographical location, not a being who fits within the universe, but the Lord of every conceivable frame of reference, every possible world, every dimension of reality that human thought can reach and every dimension beyond it.
"Say: He is God, the One. God, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born. Nor is there to Him any equivalent." (Quran 112:1-4)
"There is nothing like unto Him, and He is the Hearing, the Seeing." (Quran 42:11)
These two verses constitute the bedrock of Islamic theology. Everything else must be read in their light. A theology that honours them will be intellectually credible, spiritually profound, and humanistically generous. A theology that ignores them will, whatever its other merits, have already abandoned the Quran's own governing account of what God is and is not.
The Salafi-Wahhabi attempt to make anthropomorphism from Quranic and hadith sources fails on every dimension the evidence requires us to examine: textually, linguistically, historically, philosophically, scientifically, and humanistically. The tradition of divine transcendence - tanzih - is not a foreign import into Islam. It is the Quran's own first and last word on the nature of God.
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V.A. Mohamad Ashrof is an independent Indian scholar specializing in Islamic humanism. With a deep commitment to advancing Quranic hermeneutics that prioritize human well-being, peace, and progress, his work aims to foster a just society, encourage critical thinking, and promote inclusive discourse and peaceful coexistence. He is dedicated to creating pathways for meaningful social change and intellectual growth through his scholarship.
URL: https://newageislam.com/debating-islam/refutation-salafi-wahhabi-quranic-perspective/d/140103
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