All three of those schools run a risk whenever they speak: either part of what they say is simply wrong, or it strips the matter of its due reverence. The only position completely safe from both dangers is that of the Companions, the Successors, and the broad mass of people who have remained upon an unspoiled innate nature.

To continue: in my view the harm that figurative reinterpretation inflicts upon its adherents—driving them to deviate from the revealed law—knows no bounds. Had it not been for this practice, today’s advocates of “the oneness of being” would never have existed, nor before them their brethren the Qarmati Ismāʿīlīs, who denied the entire Sacred Law and every reality it contains—Paradise and Hell, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage—claiming them all to be mere symbols subject to their own famous re-readings. Al-ʿAllāmah al-Murtaḍā al-Yamānī, while exposing the ugliness of such reinterpretation, writes in Ithār al-Ḥaqq ʿalā al-Khalq (p. 135):

“When the Muʿtazilites and the Ashʿarites declare the Bāṭinī heretic for denying the Most Beautiful Names and for rejecting Paradise and Hell, the Bāṭinī retorts: ‘I have not denied them; I have merely said they are metaphorical—just as you have not denied “the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate, the All-Wise,” but have said that these too are metaphorical! What made a figurative belief in the All-Merciful and the All-Compassionate—two of the most famous Names—sufficient for you, yet left me unsatisfied with the rest of the Names and with Paradise and Hell, even though they are far inferior to the Names of Allah? What comparison is there between faith in Allah and His Names and faith in created things? If a metaphorical affirmation of the most renowned Divine Names suffices for you, why should the same not suffice for me with regard to Paradise, Hell, and the Resurrection?’”

I say: The present-day Qādiyānī sect is cut from the same cloth. By means of reinterpretation they have denied many incontestable religious truths, foremost among them the finality of prophethood. Following their prophet, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad—and before him Ibn ʿArabī in the Meccan Openings—they reinterpreted the words of the Exalted, “but he is the Messenger of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets” (Q 33:40), claiming that “Seal” means “adornment of the prophets,” not their last. They likewise twisted the Prophet’s statement, “There will be no prophet after me,” insisting it means “after me, that is, alongside me.” They denied the existence of the jinn, despite their repeated mention in the Noble Quran—let alone in the Sunnah and the variety of descriptions found in both—and alleged that jinn are merely a race of human beings. These and other deviations are all blessings springing from the same well of figurative interpretation that the later theologians drew upon in the verse of istiwāʾ and other verses pertaining to the Divine attributes.