and suitable nourishment agrees only with healthy bodies. Those others, however, are sick, and the sick are the minority. Hence the Most High says:

“As for those in whose hearts is deviation, they follow what is ambiguous in it, seeking discord and seeking its interpretation.”

[Āl ‘Imrān: 7]

These [are] the practitioners of disputation and speculative theology. The gravest harm this class has done to revelation is that they have interpreted much of what they believed should not be understood according to its apparent meaning. They have claimed that their interpretation is the intended meaning, and that [Allah] presented it in an ambiguous form only to try and test His servants. We seek refuge in Allah from entertaining such a notion about Him.

Rather, we say: if Allah’s mighty Book is miraculous solely by virtue of its clarity and exposition, then how far removed from the intent of revelation is someone who declares what is not [at all] ambiguous to be ambiguous, then offers his supposed interpretation of it and tells everyone, “It is your duty to believe this interpretation”! This is what they have said concerning the verse about His rising over the Throne, and other passages whose apparent meaning they have declared ambiguous. In short, most of