Chapter Eighteen
On the division of people, with respect to the revealed texts, into: the people of taʾwīl (allegorical interpretation), the people of takhyīl (imaginative representation), the people of tajhīl (declaring others ignorant), the people of tamthīl (anthropomorphic likening) (1), and the people of the middle path.

These are five categories into which people have split on this subject, each according to what they believe the texts are meant to convey.

The first category: the people of taʾwīl. They are the most confused of all the groups (2), for they have no firm footing when it comes to distinguishing what may be allegorically interpreted from what may not. They possess no consistent, comprehensive rule that must be observed and whose violation is forbidden. The other sects, by contrast, follow a single rule—even though, as we shall show, some of them are more gravely in error than the people of taʾwīl.

The second category: the people of takhyīl. They hold that the messengers did not lay bare the realities to the masses, for the latter lack the capacity to grasp them. Instead, the messengers merely cast (3) those realities into the imagination, presenting what is intelligible in sensory form. They say: Had the messengers summoned their nations to affirm a Lord who is neither inside the universe nor outside it, neither contiguous with it nor separate from it (4), neither connected to it nor disconnected from it, neither above it nor beneath it, neither to its right nor to its left, the people’s minds would have recoiled, and they would not have believed in the possibility—let alone the necessity—of the existence of such a being. Likewise, if the messengers had informed them of the true nature of His speech, namely, that it is an effusion