This, then, is what led Mujāhid—and those who agreed with him such as Ibn Qutaybah—to place the stopping point in the verse at the words wa-l-rāsikhūna fī l-ʿilm (and those firmly grounded in knowledge). They thus held that the firmly grounded know the taʾwīl (interpretation), for Mujāhid had learned from Ibn ʿAbbās the explanation of the entire Quran and all its meanings, and therefore assumed that this was the very taʾwīl denied to everyone except Allah.

The root of the issue is that the term taʾwīl is shared between what Allah intended in the Quran, the usage of certain early Muslims, and the later technical usage of some scholastic groups. Because of this lexical overlap, each person who encountered the word in his own linguistic milieu imagined that his understanding was the one referred to in the Quran. Mujāhid is an authority in tafsīr (exegesis); Sufyān al-Thawrī said, “If an interpretation comes to you from Mujāhid, that suffices you—taʾwīl, however, is another matter.”

This is borne out by the fact that none of the Companions or the Successors ever refused to explain any verse of Allah’s Book, nor did any of them say, “This is from the mutashābih (ambiguous passages) whose meaning is unknown.” Never did any of the early generations of the ummah, nor any of the imams whom people follow, claim that the Quran contains verses whose meanings are unknown both to the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and to all people of knowledge and faith. At most they would deny knowledge of certain passages to certain individuals—and that is beyond dispute.