Likewise, a group of later writers followed the same track—in step with the Sabian astrologers—and asserted that the lifetime of this community would be six hundred and ninety-three years. They arrived at that figure by taking the numerical value of the disjointed letters according to the abjad calculation, after dropping the repetitions. This, too, belongs to the kind of speculative interpretation that seeks to pinpoint the events the Qur’an foretells for the Final Day.

It is also related that some of the Christians who came to the Prophet — peace and blessings be upon him — with the Najrān delegation interpreted the words innā and naḥnu (“We” in the Qur’an) to mean that the Godhead consists of three persons, on the grounds that the pronouns are plural. That is an interpretation touching the belief in Allah Himself: the first group speculated about the Hereafter, whereas these speculated about God.

It is well known that the expressions innā and naḥnu are among the mutashābih (ambiguous passages). Depending on context, they may refer to: (1) a single being accompanied by others of the same kind; (2) a single being who speaks on behalf of assistants not of His kind; or (3) a single, majestic being who, by virtue of the multiplicity of His noble names—each of which stands for the Named One—speaks in the plural. Because the wording is one while the intended meanings are multiple, the usage is deemed ambiguous.

Words that are mushtarak (homonymous, “sharing the same form”) fall under the mutashābih, and some mutawāṭiʾ (univocal, “shared in meaning across different instances”) terms do as well. Qur’anic exegetes call this field al-wujūh wa-al-naẓāʾir (the multiple senses and their parallels) and have authored specialized “Books of Wujūh and Naẓāʾir.” In their terminology, the wujūh concern the homonymous terms, whereas the naẓāʾir deal with the univocal ones.

Some of our own scholars who wrote on the subject imagined that both the wujūh and the naẓāʾir pertain solely to the homonymous terms, claiming that they are “parallels” in wording and “senses” in meaning. The matter, however, is not as they supposed; anyone who examines the earlier works will see that the scholars spoke explicitly in the manner we have just explained.