Section

This serves as an introduction placed before the reply to the aforementioned question, and (1) the true substance of that reply will only become clear through a series of chapters:

Chapter One: (2) on understanding the essence of taʾwīl (figurative interpretation) and what the term denotes in both language and technical usage.

Chapter (3) Two: on the division of taʾwīl into what is sound and what is false.

Chapter Three: on the fact that taʾwīl is a report of the speaker’s intent, not a new formulation.

Chapter Four: on the difference between interpreting informative statements and interpreting commands and prohibitions.

Chapter Five: on the distinction between the taʾwīl that distorts the text and the taʾwīl that explains it, clarifying that the first is impossible in both informative and directive texts, whereas the second can occur in both.

Chapter Six: on demonstrating the incapacity of the practitioners of taʾwīl to establish a principled criterion for which verses and hadiths concerning the divine attributes may be interpreted and which may not.

Chapter Seven: on binding them with the very meaning to which they resort as an interpretation, showing it to be equivalent to what they had fled from.

Chapter Eight: on exposing their error in deriving from the texts the spurious notions for whose sake they resorted to interpretation, thereby combining anthropomorphism with negation.

Chapter Nine: on the duties incumbent upon anyone who engages in taʾwīl, without which his interpretation will not be accepted.