If you say, “To deny the resurrection is to belie what is necessarily known of the messengers’ religion,”
we reply: To deny the Lord’s attributes, to deny that He is a Speaker who commands and forbids(1) above His heavens, and that the command descends from Him and ascends back to Him, is likewise a denial of what they are necessarily known to have conveyed.

If you say, “Our figurative reading of the texts they brought does not amount to rejecting them or discrediting their reports,”
we respond: On what basis, then, does our figurative reading of the texts they brought concerning the resurrection(2) entail rejecting them and discrediting their reports, while yours does not—except out of sheer arbitrariness and desire?(3)

⦗18b⦘ At this, the Qarmaṭians, the freethinkers, and the Bāṭinī esotericists cried out, saying, “What has permitted you to allegorically interpret the reports yet forbidden us to allegorically interpret the commands, the prohibitions, the unlawful, and the obligatory, when all of them issue from the same niche of light? We have pursued in interpreting the practical prescriptions exactly what you have pursued in interpreting the informative texts.

“They said: Of what weight are the texts of command and prohibition compared with(4) the texts of information?

“They said further: Many(5) among you have already opened the door of interpretation for us in matters of command, allegorically reading numerous explicit or plainly worded commands and prohibitions in ways that remove them from their realities and apparent meanings. So come,(6) let us put them on one side of the scale and put our interpretations on the other, and let us weigh…"