They said: It is not permissible for anyone to present the masses with an interpretation that departs from the passage’s outward sense, for doing so would undermine the very purpose for which the divine laws and scriptures were revealed. As for the elite, they know that these texts are parables coined for intellectual realities that ordinary minds are incapable of grasping; to interpret them, therefore, would be an offense against both the Sacred Law and sound wisdom, whereas leaving them as they stand is an affirmation of the Law and of wisdom.(1) They added: In relation to these realities,(2) the intellects of the common people are weaker than those of children compared with what the intelligent and the wise among grown men can comprehend. Thus, when a sage wishes to instill fear or inspire hope in a child, he does so in a manner suited to the child’s understanding and temperament.

According to this group, the true state of affairs is that what the messengers have reported about Allah, His attributes and actions, and about the Hereafter possesses no actual reality corresponding to the words they used. Rather, it is all similitude, imaginative depiction, and the conveying of meaning by means of parables. The practitioners of taʾwīl—figurative interpretation—have assisted them in this aim with respect to knowledge of Allah, His names, and His attributes, openly stating(3) the very same meaning that the former group declared concerning resurrection and the reanimation of bodies. Indeed, they transferred those very expressions to the verses of istiwāʾ (divine establishment above the Throne), to the texts affirming divine exaltedness, and to the reports concerning the divine attributes. These interpreters, however, held it obligatory—or at least permissible—to construe such texts in a way that strips them of their literal and manifest sense, imagining that the messengers intended thereby to offer those addressed the chance to earn great reward by exerting themselves(4) to interpret the texts, extract meanings deemed fitting, and impose those meanings upon them; whereas the former party deemed all interpretation unlawful,