as ambiguous, and—as the shaykh (may Allah have mercy on him) said—everyone who opposes the Companions and the Successors who followed them with excellence seizes upon some specious argument with which he seeks to justify himself and deceive others.

The purpose here is to point out the root of disagreement in exegesis, and that one of its greatest causes lies in the false innovations that have driven their adherents to distort words from their proper contexts, to interpret the speech of Allah and His Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) contrary to what was intended, and to force upon it meanings it cannot bear.

Among the basic principles for dealing with this is that a person must first know the statement they rejected—and that it is the truth; then he must realize that the exegesis of the early generations conflicts with theirs, and that their interpretation is a novel innovation. After that he must, by the detailed means Allah has set forth for clarifying the truth, recognize the unsoundness of their explanation.

The same kind of error has also appeared among many later scholars who authored commentaries on hadith: in their hadith works they fell into the very mistakes that occur in their writings on the explanation and commentary of the Quran.

As for those who err in the evidence but not in the meaning itself—many Sufis, preachers, jurists, and others—they explain the Quran with meanings that are sound in themselves, yet the Quran does not actually indicate them, as with much of what Abu ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Sulami recorded in Haqaʾiq al-Tafsir. If, however, some of what they cite contains false meanings, then that belongs to the first category—error in both evidence and conclusion—because the very meaning they intended is invalid.