any element of trinitarianism, nor any fusion of the Creator with any of His creatures—neither with the Messiah nor with anyone else.

Within these books there are only a handful of difficult, ambiguous expressions, and even those—in spite of their obscurity—do not, either explicitly or implicitly, affirm the trinity or the alleged union. A few of them may allow for part of what you claim, yet not one of them can possibly sustain the whole of your doctrine, much less present it as their apparent or explicit meaning; at best, some of them admit a partial reading akin to yours.

You took that mere possibility and added to it the plainest forms of unbelief and the ugliest self-contradictions, then proclaimed the result to be your trust—(that is, your creed of faith).

Even if every one of those passages really could accommodate all that you contend, it would still be impermissible to abandon what is explicit and obvious in favour of a merely possible interpretation. And if only some of them seemed, on the surface, to support your position, it would still be impermissible to set aside the unequivocal texts for the sake of an uncertain surface reading.

Were we to suppose, further, that those scriptures contained clear categorical statements that were opposed by other equally clear statements, the duty would be to look upon them with the light that Allah has granted His believing servants, follow the best of what He has revealed—that is, the meaning that accords with plain reason and with the rest of God’s books—and, concerning the other passages, to accept their explanation if it can be understood, or else consign their meaning to Allah Most High, provided they are authentically traceable to the prophets.

These people, however, have turned away from what is established by plain reason and from what is known through the explicit texts—