These people have either gone astray while believing that they are following the Quran, or regarded the Quran’s apparent meaning as misguidance rather than guidance for people.

Let us offer a brief preliminary explanation. To claim that the various groups acknowledge the need to reinterpret some of the apparent meanings of the Quran and transmitted reports is to imply that, by agreement of the imams, accepting some of the apparent meanings of the Book and the Sunnah is misguidance. The person making this claim should be asked: “When the apparent meaning is misguidance and is not intended by the speaker, do you maintain that Allah has not clarified this in His Book and through His Messenger, or that it must be clarified through the scriptural texts?”

If he means the former, his words imply that the apparent meanings of some verses and hadiths are misguidance and falsehood—either disbelief or something less than disbelief—and that Allah has neither clarified this nor stated the true intended meaning or anything that rules out the false meaning.

On this account, not all of the Quran would be guidance or clarification for people; the Messenger would not have conveyed the message clearly; and Allah would not have made clear to people what they should guard against. Rather, they would have gone astray through His words before He made clear to them what they should guard against. Nor would people be commanded to reflect upon the whole Quran or to follow all of it. For if the meaning conveyed by part of the Quran were false and misleading, and nothing were explained in the Quran to dispel that misguidance and falsehood, following it would necessarily lead one astray.