Fourth: grant that “[he] has a hand in this” or “in it” means that he has complete mastery of it, or is intended to mean that he is capable of it. How does this show that the words “Then He placed His hand between my shoulders until I felt the coolness of His fingertips in my chest” signify nothing more than care and concern for him?

Fifth: if the wording were merely “Then He placed His hand,” and someone said that this was akin to such expressions as “My hand is with you” or “My hand is in this matter”—expressions indicating that one is engaged in the matter and carrying it out—the unsoundness of that explanation would not be as evident as the unsoundness of interpreting the words “Then He placed His hand between my shoulders until I felt the coolness of His fingertips between my breasts” in this way.

The sixth point: these people take the wording of the hadith, cut it into fragments and separate them, then interpret each fragment in ways both tenable and untenable.

It is well known that the interconnected parts of a statement explain one another. Its ending indicates the meaning of its beginning, while the meaning of its beginning is incomplete without its ending. As the saying goes, “A statement is understood in light of its ending.” This is something the author of al-Ta’sīs (The Foundation) and others like him frequently do. In such cases, they resemble one of the later heretics of whom it is related