He further said about Ḥassān’s lampooning of them, “By Him in whose hand is my soul, it is more piercing against them than arrows.” (1)

And how could clarifying these matters not be a form of jihād in Allah’s cause, when most of the interpretations that run counter to the righteous predecessors—the Companions, the Followers, the entire corps of ḥadīth scholars, and the leading Imams of Islam whose reputation within the ummah is unassailable—spring from the speaker’s tampering with the revealed texts and his ill opinion of them (2). In substance they match the taunts of those who sniped at the Messenger and his religion, the hypocrites, and the atheists, for they allege that the outward wording of the Revelation is falsehood and impossibility, unbelief and misguidance, anthropomorphism, crude analogy, or mere illusion.

Next, they divert the words to meanings that are known—were those meanings actually intended—to belong to the realm of riddles and puzzles, something no one aiming at sincere counsel and lucid explanation would ever employ. Hence, defending the speech of Allah and His Messenger and shielding it from assault is among the finest deeds, the most beloved to Allah, and the most beneficial to the servant.

Whoever is granted by Allah a penetrating insight will recognize the feebleness of these distorters’ intellects, perceive that they are people of manifest error, and see that they are the brethren of those Allah censured for “altering words from their proper places”—people who neither understand nor reflect upon speech—whom He likened to “frightened wild donkeys.” (3) [ق 13 أ]