and His elevation above the creation, and the Face, the two Hands, the descent, the laughter, the joy, the anger, the pleasure, and the like. So what makes you more entitled to correctness in your interpretation than I?”

He can cite no reason (1) that has driven him (2) to reinterpret without his opponent adducing a reason of the same kind—stronger, weaker, or equal—by which he too justifies reinterpretation.

Whenever the allegorist argues with the deniers of the Resurrection and the bodily gathering, adducing the texts of revelation, they advance interpretations that contradict those texts’ outward sense and reality. They retort to the one citing them, “Our reinterpretation of these passages is just like your reinterpretation of the attribute texts—indeed, these passages are more numerous (3) and more explicit; so if allegorical reading is admissible in them, it is even more readily admissible in texts that are less explicit.”

When one debates the Rāfiḍah using the texts that establish the virtue of the two Shaykhs—Abū Bakr and ʿUmar—and of the rest of the Companions, they reinterpret them in a fashion akin to the Jahmite’s treatment of the verses on the divine attributes; in many instances their reinterpretations are even stronger than those of the Jahmite (4), while at other times they are equivalent or weaker.

If the Jahmite employs the texts proving that the perpetrator of major sins remains a believer, does not become an unbeliever, and will not abide eternally in Hell, using them against the Khārijites and against the Threateners who insist that every divine threat must inevitably be carried out and such sinners eternally damned, they respond, “Those texts are to be reinterpreted, and doing so is easier than reinterpreting the attribute texts.”

And when he brings forward against the Murjiʾites the texts showing that faith is word, deed, and intention, that it increases and decreases, they say, “These texts, too, are open to reinterpretation, just as the texts… ⦗25b⦘