And Allah Most High says:

“And on the Day He will call to them and say, ‘Where are My partners whom you used to claim?’ We will bring forth a witness from every nation and say, ‘Produce your proof.’ Then they will know that the truth belongs to Allah, and whatever they used to fabricate will desert them.” [Al-Qasas: 74–75]

You find these people bewildered by passages such as His saying:

“No one knows its interpretation except Allah, and those firmly grounded in knowledge say, ‘We believe in it; all of it is from our Lord.’ Yet none take heed except those of understanding.” [Āl ‘Imrān: 7]

This is because they supposed that “interpretation” means diverting the scriptural texts from what their wording entails.

One group says that those firmly grounded in knowledge know this interpretation. They permit interpretations of this kind—the interpretations of the Jahmiyyah who negate the divine attributes.

Some of them regard such interpretations as obligatory at times and permissible at others. They may prohibit them for certain people, or in certain circumstances, because of some incidental consideration. Even the heretics among the philosophers and Sufis, and others like them, may prohibit such interpretations—not because they believe and affirm what the texts convey, but because they know that these interpretations have no consistent governing principle and that making them public corrupts people. They therefore consider it beneficial to refrain from disclosing them, even if such interpretation is true in itself.

These people may say: The messengers addressed people in terms that do not indicate the truth, because people's welfare could only be secured in this way. Indeed, it could only be secured by evoking in their minds, for some beneficial purpose, images of things that have no existence in external reality—just as a sleeper, a child, or a person of limited understanding is presented with images of things that do not exist, through some suitable association, because this serves that person's interests.