the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—replied, “From water,” to someone who asked him, “Who are you?” He meant, “We were created from water,” whereas the listener understood that he belonged to an Arab tribe called Mā’ (Water).

If that is so, and their interlocutor is an oppressor who, on the basis of corrupt opinions he has invented, deems it lawful to inflict upon them what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, they are not blameworthy for employing equivocal language. Likewise, someone who affirms the divine attributes and denies that Allah is a body, intending to deny the false meanings the term carries but not the true ones, falls into this category. This is not blameworthy according to reason or religion. Rather, it is a form of Allah’s devising a stratagem for the believer who is in the right: Allah has granted him latitude in speech such that he lies in what he intends, while the oppressor does not understand anything he could use to further his oppression and aggression. Instead, the believer conceals that from him.

Although this misleads the oppressor, who understands from his words something he does not intend, this misleading is recompense for the oppressor’s own confounding of truth with falsehood through his lies and injustice—as in the stratagem Allah devised for Joseph, the man of truth—peace be upon him—when the herald proclaimed:

“O caravan, indeed you are thieves.”
(70)
[Joseph 70]

For even if they believed that what was meant was the theft of