opposing the Book. They speak without knowledge about Allah, His nature, and His Book. They use ambiguous language and deceive ignorant people through the confusion they create. We seek refuge in Allah from the trials caused by those who lead others astray.”

[The innovators use expressions from the Quran, the Sunnah, and ordinary language, but intend other meanings by them]

The point at issue here is his statement:

“They use ambiguous language and deceive ignorant people through the confusion they create.”

This ambiguous language, with which they deceive ignorant people, comprises the ambiguous, unspecified expressions they use to oppose the texts of the Quran and Sunnah. Those expressions occur in the Quran, the Sunnah, and people’s speech, but with meanings other than those they themselves intend. They assign other meanings to them, thus creating confusion and ambiguity. Examples include “reason,” “a rational person,” and “the intelligible.” In Muslim usage, “reason” denotes only an accident: either the act denoted by the verbal noun in aqala, ya'qilu, aqlan (to reason), or the faculty through which reasoning takes place—the innate faculty. They, however, mean by it an immaterial substance subsisting independently.

The same applies to “matter” and “form,” and indeed to “substance,” “accident,” “body,” “occupying space,” “direction,” “composition,” “part,” “dependence,” “cause,” “effect,” “lover,” “love,” and “beloved.” It applies even to the word “one” in discussions of Allah’s oneness, to “coming into existence” and “beginninglessness,” to “necessary” and “possible,” and even to “existence,” “essence,” and other expressions.

The practitioners of every discipline acknowledge that they agree upon terms through which they communicate their intended meanings, just as practitioners of scholarly disciplines have expressions with which they describe their discipline, and these