Should someone object, “But you have already interpreted certain verses and reports. You said about His statement, ‘He is with you wherever you are’ (al-Hadid 57:4) that it means ‘by His knowledge,’ and you have offered similar explanations for other passages; therefore, the same charge you raise against us falls back on you,”—

We reply: We have not interpreted anything in the technical sense. Assigning these phrases the meanings just mentioned is not interpretation, for interpretation (taʼwīl) is to divert a word from its apparent sense, whereas these very meanings are the apparent sense of the words, as evidenced by the fact that they are what first springs to mind when one hears them.

The “apparent sense” of a word is whatever first occurs to the understanding, whether the usage is literal or figurative. For that reason, the apparent meaning of terms that have an established customary usage is the figurative, not the literal—such as the words rāwiyah (a camel that carries water) and ẓaʿīnah (a woman riding in a litter) and the like. To shift such terms back to their literal meanings would constitute interpretation and would require supporting evidence. The same holds true for expressions that possess a technical legal usage alongside a purely lexical one, such as wuḍūʾ, ṭahārah, ṣalāh, ṣawm, zakāh, and ḥajj; their apparent sense is their Shar‘i usage, not their lexical meaning.

Once this is understood, the meaning that naturally occurs to the mind when one hears the phrase “Allah is with you” is “with His protection and care.” Thus, Allah related about His Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him: “when he said to his companion, ‘Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us’” (al-Tawbah 9:40), and He said to Moses, peace be upon him: “Indeed, I am with you both; I hear and I see” (Taha 20:46). Had the intention been that He is, in His very essence, with every person, those two would not have enjoyed any special distinction, for His essence would be present with others exactly as with them; nor would that sense have served as a reason to remove Abu Bakr’s sorrow, for it would carry no causal force.

It is therefore clear that the apparent sense of these expressions is precisely what we have affirmed; hence our explanation is not interpretation. And even supposing it were interpretation, it was not we who first advanced it. Rather, it was the predecessors—may Allah’s mercy be upon them—whose correctness is established and whose example must be followed. Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Ḍaḥḥāk, Mālik, Sufyān, and many other scholars all said regarding His words, “He is with you,” that it means His knowledge. Thus it has been firmly established