“Firm in Power on the Throne”

Qur'an 20:5 · Ṭā Hā

ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنُ عَلَى ٱلْعَرْشِ ٱسْتَوَىٰ

(20:5) —the All-beneficent, settled on the Throne.

The question

“The Beneficent is firm in power on the Throne (ʿalā al-ʿarsh istawā)” — does God literally sit on a throne, should the words be left without explanation, or are they to be interpreted — and how?

Views answered: the literalists, the mufawwiḍah, who leave the meaning to God, the muʾawwilah (interpreters), including al-Rāzī, those who take the phrase as “the Beneficent is on the Throne”

Al-Mizan's argument

Al-Mizan reads “istawā on the Throne” as God's authority over creation and His regulation of every thing's affairs — the Throne being, as with a king, the seat from which rule issues — and rejects the parsing “the Beneficent is on the Throne”. In the narrations Imam al-Kāẓim, ʿAlī and Imam al-Ṣādiq explain the verse as God's equal relation to all things, the firmness of His regulation, and deny that He is from, in or on anything. Al-Mizan then sets out how Muslims have approached such verses: the early mufawwiḍah who negate without affirming and keep the words on their literal sense; the muʾawwilah (interpreters), in three groups, who interpret attributes but leave God's acts — the Throne, the Chair, the Pen, the Tablet — in their familiar physical sense; and al-Rāzī's caution against opening the door of interpretation. He shows that the Ahl al-Bayt both affirmed and negated, explaining what the realities are and are not, that a word's meaning holds through the changing forms of its referent (the example of the lamp), and that literalism amounts to referring what is ambiguous in the Qur'an to what is ambiguous in hadith, rather than to the Qur'an's decisive verses.

Reading guide

Each part opens the commentary at that point.

Read the whole commentary on 20:5 →

“Firm in Power on the Throne” ​

The question ​

Al-Mizan's argument ​

Reading guide ​

“Firm in Power on the Throne”

The question

Al-Mizan's argument

Reading guide