and away from its obvious sense. This is precisely the kind of taʾwīl over which they dispute when it comes to the divine attributes: one author pens a treatise refuting taʾwīl or condemning it; someone else declares, “The verses on the attributes must not be subjected to taʾwīl”; a third replies, “On the contrary, they must be re-interpreted”; while a fourth will say, “Taʾwīl is permissible—employed when expedient and set aside when expedient, or reserved for scholars rather than the laity,” and so on, with statements and counter-statements multiplying.

As for the word “taʾwīl” in the language of the early Muslims (the Salaf), it carries two meanings.

First: explaining a statement and clarifying its sense, whether that sense accords with the surface wording or diverges from it. In this usage, taʾwīl and tafsīr are nearly synonymous, if not interchangeable. God knows best, this is what the exegete Mujāhid meant when he said that the scholars know its taʾwīl. Likewise, Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī repeatedly begins his commentary with the phrase, “The discussion of the taʾwīl of His saying such-and-such…” and, “The people of taʾwīl have differed concerning this verse,” by which he intends tafsīr.

Second—this being the third overall sense of the term taʾwīl: the very reality to which the words refer. If the statement is a command, its taʾwīl is the actual performance of the commanded act; if it is a report, its taʾwīl is the actual occurrence of the thing reported.

There is a clear gap between this meaning and the previous one. In the preceding sense, taʾwīl belongs to the realm of knowledge and discourse—exegesis, explanation, elucidation—existing in heart and tongue, as mental, verbal, or written representation. In the present sense, taʾwīl is the concrete realities that exist outside the mind, whether past or future.

Thus, when one says, “The sun has risen,” the taʾwīl of those words is the sun’s very rising. Here taʾwīl pertains to outward, objective existence: the taʾwīl of speech is the facts established outside us, with all their properties, states, and circumstances. Such realities cannot be fully grasped merely through words and reports unless the hearer has already conceived them—or something analogous to them—apart from any verbal description. Yet from their properties and states he does come to know as much as the speaker has conveyed, whether through metaphor, approximation, a shared element between that reality and something else, or by other means.

This