What is intended here is that the early generations—the Salaf—most often stopped at the Divine statement, “None knows its interpretation except Allah” (Q 3:7). They did so because they held that the interpretation meant here is the ultimate reality whose knowledge Allah has reserved for Himself alone. Yet another group among them—Mujāhid, Ibn Qutaybah, and others—maintained that those firmly grounded in knowledge do know the interpretation; by “interpretation,” however, they meant the second sense of the term, namely commentary or exegesis (tafsīr). Thus there is no real contradiction between the two positions.

As for taʾwīl understood as diverting a word from its apparent meaning to some other meaning, this was not what the Salaf intended when they used the term—except in a case where it is known that the speaker actually meant what is said to be contrary to the outward sense. In that event they would regard it as taʾwīl in the sense of tafsīr, because it explains the wording and clarifies the speaker’s intent; or they would subsume it under the other category, the objective reality that Allah alone knows, seeing it as included therein, not as something contrary to the outward meaning.

The Salaf repudiated those interpretations that remove the wording from what Allah and His Messenger intended, for such interpretations amount to “altering the words from their (proper) places.” They rejected false taʾwīl—that is, false tafsīr—just as we reject the attempt to explain someone’s speech in a way the speaker never intended. They might also object to an interpretation—again meaning tafsīr—whose soundness is unknown; we reject something either because we know it to be false or because we have no knowledge that it is true.

They did not object to translating speech for one who does not know the language, though they might object to parts of a translation that the listener cannot grasp or that would harm him to know, just as they decry