God, they went on to say, did not have attributes, such as justice, mercy, or power: ascribing attributes to God made Him analyzable into parts, which violated tawhid—unity. God was a single indivisible whole too grand for the human mind to perceive or imagine. What human beings called the attributes of God only named the windows through which humans saw God. The attributes we ascribe to Allah, the Mu’tazilites said, were actually only descriptions of ourselves.
