meaning. The mark of the investigative scholar is to be thorough, divest himself of the influences of time, enter the depths of the past, weigh up things on the scales of logic, and find the source of everything.

What made me aware of this was an eclipse of the moon when I was young. I asked my mother about it, and she replied: "A snake has swallowed the moon." So I asked: "Why can you still see it?" So she said: "The snakes in the sky are semi-transparent."

See how a simile (teşbih) had become reality and with its interposition, obscured the reality. For employing a simile, astronomers called the intersections of the two arcs of the two imaginary circles formed by the moon's orbit and the zodiac, the head and tail of the great serpent. Then when the moon passes either the head or the tail and the sun passes the other, the moon will be eclipsed by the inter- position of the earth. [^10]

[^10]:For a more detailed description of this childhood memory, see, The Flashes Collection (Istanbul: Sözler Publications, 2009), 129.

Gentle reader who is not bored with these confused words of mine! Study this Premise attentively too. Scrutinise it with a microscope. For numerous superstitions and contradictions have been born of this stock. Logic and rhetoric should be taken as the guide.

#### Conclusion

Conclusion

The true meaning should bear a stamp. What defines the stamp is the sheer beauty born of the balance between the aims of the Shari'a. Figurative language (mecaz) is permissible if subject to the rules of rhetoric. For to look on a rhetorical figure as reality and reality as figurative, and to show them thus, is to strengthen the despotism of ignorance. However harmful the tendency to be negligent, which continually understanding everything literally gave rise to the misguided way of the literalists (zâhiriyyün; Ar. ẓāhiriyyūn); so love of excess was even more harmful, for continually interpreting everything figuratively, it gave rise to the futile school of the esoterists (batınıyyûn; Ar. bāṭiniyyūn). It is only the philosophy of the Shari'a and rhetoric, and logic and science