The stories told above represent the change as sudden. According to the evidence of his books that was not so. In his return there were two stages. In the first of these he upheld the seven rational Qualities (_sifat aqliya_) of God, Life, Knowledge, Power, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech: but explained away the Qur’anic anthropomorphisms of God’s face, hands, feet, etc. In the second stage, which fell, apparently, after he had moved to Baghdad and come under the strong Hanbalite influences there, he explained away nothing, but contented himself with the position that the anthropomorphisms were to be taken, _bila kayfa wala tashbih_, without asking how and without drawing any comparison. The first phrase is directed against the Mu‘tazilites, who inquired persistently into the nature and possibility of such things in God; the second, against the anthropomorphists (_mushabbihs_, comparers; _mujassims_, corporealizers), mostly ultra Hanbalites and Karramites, who said that these things in God were like the corresponding things in men. At all stages, however, he was prepared to defend his conclusions and assail those of his adversaries by dint of argument. [Sidenote: SYSTEM OF AL-ASH‘ARI] The details of his system will be best understood by reading his creed and the creed of al-Fudali, which is essentially Ash‘arite. Both are in the Appendix of Translated Creeds. Here, it is necessary to draw attention to two, only, of the obscurer points. On the vexed question, “What is a thing?” he anticipated Kant. The early theologians, orthodox and theoretical, and those later ones also who did not follow him, regarded, as we have seen, existence (_wujud_) as only one of the qualities belonging to an existing thing (_mawjud_). It was there all the time, but it lacked the quality of “existence”; then that quality was added to its other qualities and it became existent. But al-Ash‘ari and his followers held that existence was the “self” (_ayn_) of the entity and not a quality or state, however personal or necessary. See, on the whole, Appendix of Creeds.