an approximation; for even though the thing indicated is one and the same, pointing to something that is present is not the same as pointing to something that is distant and out of sight. Moreover, the word Kitab (Book) contains, by virtue of being something written and safeguarded, a nuance that the word Qurʾan, as something recited, manifest, and proclaimed, does not convey. Such subtleties are built into the Quran.
Accordingly, when one exegete says of the phrase an tubsala that it means “to be confined,” while another renders it “to be held in pledge,” and the like, this is not a contradiction, even though what is confined may sometimes be pledged and sometimes not. It is, as noted earlier, only an approximation of the intended sense. Collecting the various renderings of the early generations (salaf) in cases such as this is extremely beneficial, for the aggregate of their expressions points to the intended meaning more clearly than any one or two of them in isolation. Even so, some genuine disagreement between them is unavoidable, just as it is in matters of legal judgment.
We also know that the great bulk of points on which ordinary Muslims depend are in fact known with certainty—indeed, mutawātir—among both laypeople and scholars: the number of the daily prayers, the requisite bowings in each, their appointed times; the obligatory zakāt and its thresholds; the designation of the month of Ramadan; the rites of circumambulation, standing at ʿArafah, stoning the pillars, the miqāts, and similar essentials.
Thus the Companions’ disagreements about the grandfather and the siblings, about the case of al-mushāraka, and the like, do not cast doubt upon the vast majority of questions in the laws of inheritance. What ordinary people chiefly need concerns the direct line of kinship—fathers and children—and the kālālah, namely brothers and sisters, together with their spouses. Allah has revealed three detailed verses on inheritance: in the first He mentioned the ascendants and descendants; in the second He mentioned the collateral relatives who inherit by fixed share, such as the spouses and the maternal half-siblings; and in the third He mentioned the collateral relatives who inherit through agnatic succession (taʿṣīb).