your imagination. Moreover, the customer for reality will not buy these wares of yours. He'll say: "The verses' meanings are of pearl and this is mere clods. What the Hadiths impart is spirit, but this resembles nothing more than a gadfly!"

An Explanatory Tale

A literary tale told by the Kurds: There was a man called Alo who used to steal honey. He was told he would be found out. So in order to fool them, he got wild bees to fill up an empty comb and stole honey from somewhere else. This he hid in the hive. If anyone asked him about it, he would say: "It's the artwork of my bees, for they are honey engineers." Then when conversing with his bees, they would say together: "You do the buzzing, I provide the honey !

Good Sir who makes forced interpretations with good appetite! Don't find solace in this tale; it is a parable (teşbih). The meaning you produce is not honey; it's poison. And those words are not bees; they are the words of that consummate Book, revealing the spirits of truths to the heart and conscience, like angels. Hadiths are the source of life and inspire reality.

In Short: To be deficient is harmful, as is going to excess. Perhaps it is even more harmful. But going to excess is more at fault since it causes deficiency. Yes, excess opened the door to indulgence. For rotten things had been mixed in with those lofty truths, so the deficient and the unfair cavillers unjustly felt disgust at the truths, and, God forbid, deemed them blemished and worthless. But if one defaced coin is found in a treasury and one rotten windfall from elsewhere is spotted in an orchard, is it right and fair to assume that the entire treasury is false or all the apples are rotten, and so defame them by spurning them?

#### Conclusion

Conclusion

My aim with this Premise: public opinion wants a [new] interpretation (tefsir) of the Qur'an. In every era one particular thing is dominant; time too is an interpreter; situations and circumstances also disclose things. The generally held ideas of the ulema still edu-