misguidance and innovation, the generator of all disagreement and schism, and the well-spring of every cause of divergence, enmity, and hatred.

One of its gravest scourges, and one of the community’s greatest calamities on account of it, is that the misleading passions and ruinous opinions it begets continue to grow and multiply with the passing of days and the succession of ages. The matter is not like the earlier deviations that sprang from the corrupt roots of foreign religions, for the falsity of those is well known to the ummah, and their adherents harbour no hope of insinuating them into the religion of Islam. The followers of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Dualism, and the like have no ambition to insert the foundations of their creeds (1) into Islam, nor do they expect to lure a Muslim to them, nor will they ever succeed in ushering him in through that door. It is otherwise with the faction of reinterpretation: they invite the Muslim through the gateway of the Quran and the Sunnah in the name of venerating them, claiming that their texts possess an esoteric meaning accessible only to a privileged circle of the learned and the insightful, while the general populace remains blind to it. The harm this faction inflicts upon Islam and its people is, therefore, greater than the harm caused by its openly hostile enemies. Their likeness, vis-à-vis those others, is that of a people in a fortress besieged by an enemy who had despaired of breaching it and entering; then a party from within the fortress opened it for him and empowered him to come in, so the calamity that befell the inhabitants of the fortress came from their own ranks.

In sum, the passions spawned by false reinterpretations are innumerable and without end; rather, they increase and proliferate in proportion to the transient notions and fancies of those who practise reinterpretation, and to the conclusions their conjectures and illusions drive them toward. Hence, anyone who sets himself to scrutinise the various doctrines and track them down will constantly stumble upon assertions from the schools of the people of reinterpretation that he had—