his aim is not to understand what the Messenger intended, but to prevent his opponent from citing them as evidence. Hence many of them—including Abū al-Husayn al-Basrī and his followers, such as al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, and Ibn al-Hājib—said that if the Muslim community differed over the interpretation of a verse, holding two views, later generations could introduce a third view, unlike the case in which they differed over legal rulings, holding two views. They thus allowed that the entire community might be united upon error in interpreting the Quran and hadith, and that Allah might have revealed a verse intending a meaning that the Companions and their successors did not understand, while they said instead that Allah intended another meaning.

Had they grasped what this “position” entailed, they would not have said this. For their foundational principle is that the community does not unite upon error, nor does it hold two views that are both mistaken while the correct view is a third that it has never expressed. Yet they have become accustomed to reinterpreting whatever contradicts their views. For them, the purpose of interpretation is to identify a possible meaning in the wording of a verse: to show that the wording could bear that meaning. They have failed to realize that, when an interpreter construes a verse in a particular sense, he is explaining its intended meaning and reporting that Allah Most High intended that meaning.

Likewise, if they say that a verse may mean this, whereas the community before them said only that it meant either this or that, they have allowed that Allah had not informed the community of His intended meaning, and that the community had reported His intention to be something other than what He actually intended. Yet their claim could hold if interpretation consisted in saying that this meaning may be intended, without