What Can Historians Know About Early Readings of These Verses? — Ali Shukri Amin
First published on my writing site: www.aliamin.info/2026/09/early-meanings-of-quranic-verses/
By Ali Shukri Amin. I first wrote this as a comment on r/AcademicQuran, in the thread “Academically speaking, what are the possible meanings of Quranic mentions of Allah's "hands," "eyes," "face," and so on? Did early Muslims and Muslim theologians understand them literally or figuratively? How do academics understand those mentions?”, copied here as written.
There is not enough historical evidence to know how early Muslims or even the Quranic Author interpreted these Verses. Considering that some of these expressions seem to be figures of speech, others seem to be more literal, it seems more likely that the Quranic Author & the immediate audience did not focus on the anthropomorphic versus literal debate. It was not on their radar, so to speak.
When Muslim scholars began coming into contact with practitioners of other faiths or scholars of other milleus, they were exposed to debates and ideas from their intellectual traditions. That’s not to say much of the anthropomorphic versus literal debate is not indigenous to the Islamic tradition, but it did not happen in a vaccum.
This seems to be moreso a question of cognitive orientation and the philosophy of language than even an Islamic or historical question. Why do some people, broadly speaking, interpret words more literally? Why do others interpret them more figuratively?
This question spans cultures and, while the Sifat controversy is a microcosm, I don’t believe is the first or only battleground.
Quite simply, if the early Muslims or the Quranic Author had an opinion on literalism/anthropomorphism versus figurative/metaphorical depictions of God’s “body parts” as rendered in the Quran – it just isn’t clear from the sources. I would go so far as to say it isn’t even clear in the Sunni corpus, taking the historicity of hadith for granted, let alone the corpus that HCM academics consider to be reliable.
We don’t see these discussions in Islamic history until shortly before the time of the Mu’tazilah, when we know that especially near Eastern Greco-Roman influenced Christian theology & philosophy was already being grappled with.
The fact that the apocryphal story of Jahm b. Safwan states he apostated after engaging with Buddhists and used rationalist to return to Islam, founding “Jahmism”, is very telling. Whether or not the story is true, the idea that Muslim intellectuals were grappling with intellectual traditions posing these problems and having to come up with solutions may indicate that a lot of these “Islamic” debates are far reaching
Edit:
u/abdullah_ansar was able to point me in the direction of:
Esteban Freidin and Luz Acera Martini, “An Analytic Cognitive Style Negatively Predicts a More Literal but Not a More Symbolic Religiosity Type,” The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 32, no. 1 (2022): 31–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2020.1868197.
Posted September 15, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
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