“…By Allah, passion has never ensnared a devoted lover (1) … except that mankind has found it hard to rescue him.

And because of (2) this fascination with the strange, and the soul’s readiness to welcome every novelty, people have busied themselves with outlandish tales, the marvels of created beings, riddles, puzzles, and bizarre images (3), even though what is familiar is more wondrous than all of that—more beautiful and more perfectly fashioned.

Section
The sixth cause: setting up a series of preliminaries before embarking on reinterpretation, preliminaries that serve (4) like the ropes and stakes of its pavilion.

Among these preliminaries is their disparagement of the literalists: they reproach and belittle them, claiming that they are ignorant folk with no intellects (5), mere transmitters of textual surface meanings. They then circulate stories of those people’s alleged defects and stupidity—some of which are true (6), but most of which are false—just as it is related that one of them was asked about the verse, “The Most Merciful rose over the Throne” [Ta Ha 4]: Is this statement literal or figurative? He replied: