They also prohibited the Jahmite reinterpretations, repudiated them, and declared them invalid, for their very substance is to strip the texts of the meanings they actually convey.

The statements of Aḥmad and of the imams before him are perfectly clear: they refuted the Jahmite reinterpretations, upheld the texts upon the meanings they indicate, and derived from them some of what they signify—just as they do with every other passage dealing with promise, threat, virtue, and the like.

Indeed, Aḥmad said with regard to hadiths unrelated to the divine Attributes, “Let them pass as they have come,” applying this to hadiths of threat—such as, “Whoever cheats us is not one of us”—and to hadiths that speak of virtues. By this he meant that a hadith’s wording is not to be displaced from its proper context, as those do who tamper with it and then, in later parlance, call their tampering “interpretation.”

Accordingly, what these later figures term “interpretation” is, in the judgment of the imams, nothing but false distortion. Likewise, in his book Refutation of the Heretics and the Jahmites, Aḥmad states that they cling to the ambiguous verses of the Qur’an; he then discusses those very verses, clarifying their meaning and explanation in a way that contradicts the Jahmite reading, and in so doing follows the method of the earlier imams.

Thus the imams are unanimously agreed that they did understand the meaning of those ambiguous texts, that one is not to remain silent about explaining and interpreting them; rather, they are to be explained and interpreted, by consensus of the imams, without distorting them or deviating with respect to Allah’s names and verses.

What further exposes the confusion that has arisen here is that Ahl al-Sunnah are united in rejecting the Jahmite reinterpretations and those of every other deviant, irreligious group. The “rejected interpretation” is