apprehension is not literally a term for seeing is that the word “apprehension” has a literal meaning other than seeing, and must therefore have a literal meaning of seeing. We say that apprehension does not literally mean seeing because its literal meaning is catching up with or reaching something, whether spatially, as in the words of Allah Most High:

‘The companions of Moses said, “We are sure to be overtaken!”’ {61} [al-Shu‘arā’ 61]

or temporally, as when one says, ‘Qatādah lived to meet al-Hasan’; or with respect to a quality or state, as when one says, ‘He grasped the speech,’ or ‘The fruit reached maturity,’ meaning that it ripened. Moreover, one may say, ‘I apprehended the heat of the night with my sight,’ even though heat cannot be seen. We thus know that apprehension has a literal meaning other than seeing. It must therefore not literally mean seeing, lest this entail multiple literal meanings, contrary to the default presumption.

We say that apprehension is used figuratively only for seeing something finite for two reasons. First, when we see something finite, our sight, despite its distance from the object seen, reaches it, while nothing else does. This resembles someone traversing the distance to something until he reaches and arrives at it. Since the notion of catching up with something was conceived in this kind of seeing, it was called apprehension. As for our apprehension of something that is not in any direction at all, the notion of reaching does not apply to it, and therefore