Where Ash'ari and Maturidi theologians met the Mu'tazila with kalam of their own, argument constructed to defend scripture using the rationalist method's own tools, Athari theology refused the terms of the contest altogether. Its watchword, bila kayfa, without asking how, holds that when scripture describes God as having a hand, sitting on a throne or speaking in words, the honest response is to affirm the description exactly as given and refuse to ask how it applies to a God unlike anything created, rather than either explaining it away as figurative, the rationalist route, or imagining it in creaturely terms, the anthropomorphist error the Athari position was equally built to avoid.
That refusal was not indifference to argument; it was itself a considered theological position, that human reason has no secure footing for deciding in advance what God's nature can and cannot include, and that submitting to the plain sense of revealed text is safer than trusting a method that had already, in Athari eyes, led the Mu'tazila into the error of declaring the Quran created. The stance demanded real discipline: an Athari theologian confronted with a scriptural description that sounded uncomfortably physical was required to hold the line and affirm it as given rather than reach for either of the two easier exits, and later Athari and Hanbali writers, Ibn Taymiyya prominent among them, spent considerable energy defending exactly that discipline against critics on both sides.