Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the 

Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the 

Sixth to the Eleventh Century (London: Longman, 1986); 

W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 1956).

anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is a topic in classical Islamic 

theology

. It is concerned with the question as to 

whether God resembles human beings in his fea-

tures (attributes), actions, and emotions. Is God 

completely unlike his creation and distant from 

it, or not? The issue was raised in debates about 

statements in the q

Uran

 and 

hadith

 as well as in 

efforts made by early Muslims to distinguish their 

religious beliefs from non-Islamic ones, especially 

those of the ancient Near Eastern cultures and the 

Greeks, who commonly portrayed their gods and 

goddesses in human form, and Christians, who 

held that J

esUs

 was God in the flesh. Political con-

flicts within the Muslim community in the eighth 

century may also have intensified the debate.

Muslims who were called anthropomor-

phists (people who believed that God resembled 

humans) looked to passages in the Quran that say, 

for example, “Grace is in God’s hand” (Q 3:73) 

and “His throne encompasses the heavens and 

earth” (Q 2:255). They argued that God therefore 

must have a real hand and that he had a body that 

could be seated on a throne. The hadith contain 

even stronger anthropomorphisms, such as the 

one based on the Bible, which says that God cre-

ated a

dam

 “in his image.” Their opponents, how-

ever, argued that such statements could not be 

taken literally, but that they were figures of speech 

intended to help ordinary humans grasp abstract 

theological concepts. To support their views, 

the opponents of anthropomorphism quoted the 

Quran verse that says of God “nothing is like him” 

(Q 42:11), implying that God lacks resemblance 

to his creation, including humans.

Anthropomorphic understandings of God 

were based partly on popular religious piety in 

the eighth and ninth centuries, and they were 

articulated by Sunni scholars who held to the lit-

eral reading of the Quran and hadith, as well as by 

followers of extremist Shii doctrines. The extreme 

rationalist view of God that denied any real 

resemblance between God and his creation was 

articulated by the m

Utazili

 s

chool

 and supported