This also answers those who ask, “Why were ambiguous verses revealed?” The ambiguity in question arises from the listener’s limitations and deficiencies in understanding and knowledge. It also provides an answer to al-Rāzī’s discussion of the division into clear and ambiguous verses. He mentioned that every group regards what accords with its own position as clear and what accords with its opponents’ position as ambiguous. Yet he himself then classified as ambiguous whatever contradicts rational proof, and as clear whatever does not contradict rational proof.

He thus made clarity consist in the absence of a rational counterargument, rather than in a quality of the discourse itself—its having been made precise, clarified, and set out in detail. Yet once the possibility of a rational counterargument is admitted in principle, its absence cannot be established with certainty; this therefore does not remove the discourse from the category of the ambiguous. Consequently, his position ultimately became that all verbal proofs drawn from revelation are ambiguous, and that none can be relied upon as evidence in matters of knowledge.

On his account, therefore, this verse no longer has any meaning whereby ambiguous passages may be referred back to clear ones:

“In it are clear verses; they are the foundation of the Book.” [Āl ‘Imrān 7]

Instead, what everything is referred back to is rational proof. Whatever agrees with it, or does not contradict it, is