—from their masters’ aims matters that cannot be gleaned from language alone. Yet the practical purport of a command or a prohibition must be known, whereas the interpretation of a declarative report is of a different order.

Once this distinction is clear, the interpretation of whatever God has related about His transcendent, self-sufficient essence—together with the realities implied by His names and attributes—is simply the very reality of that sacred essence, qualified by the realities of those attributes. Likewise, the interpretation of what He has announced concerning reward and punishment is nothing other than the very occurrence of that reward and that punishment.

Hence, whatever reaches us in the hadith, we act upon what is unequivocal and we believe in what is ambiguous. For when God speaks about Himself or about the Last Day, He employs words that are, to some extent, equivocal; their meanings resemble things we know in this world. He has told us, for example, that Paradise contains meat, milk, honey, water, wine, and the like. In wording and in general sense these resemble their worldly counterparts, yet they are not the same, and their reality is unlike the reality we experience here.