Reminder

My literalist and superficial-viewing addressee of the mind, whom I have scolded and rebuked and exposed: it is usually the enemies of religion who going to one extreme and looking on Islam from afar are unable to see its beauty. But sometimes its ignorant friends who go to the other extreme cause harm, thinking they are doing good.

The Fifth Calamity: One of things that taking the hands of those unfortunates who go to one extreme or the other and cast them into darkness, is their seeking literal truth in every part of figurative speech. For sure a seed of truth has to be found in all figurative speech from which the figures may sprout and grow. Alternatively, truth is a light-giving wick, while figurative speech is the lamp's glass, increasing the light. Yes, love is in the heart, and the intellect in the brain; it's futile to search for them in the hand or foot.

Sixth Calamity: What screens the sight and conceals eloquence is restricting the view to literal meanings. This means that however much the truth is perceived by the intellect, so figures cannot be aggressed against. If they are, the meanings are hidden. It is due to this that the beauty and eloquence of the Qur'an's verses and of Hadiths cannot be shown through exegesis or translations. It is as though the literalists consider the associated meaning of the figure to be opposed to what is reasonably true. But such meanings may be either mental, or emotional, or customary, or contextual, or any of a lot of other things. If you wish, enter the two hundred and twenty-first door of Dalā'il al-I'jāz, a garden of Paradise, and you'll see how the mighty 'Abd al-Qāhir [^40] angrily drew such unfortunates to him and rebuked and scolded them.

[^40]:'Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078), eminent philologist and literary theorist, and author of Asrār al-Balāgha (on the theory of imagery) and Dalā'il al-I'jāz (on the theory of style). He was born and died in Gurgān, east of the Caspian Sea.

Seventh Calamity: One of the things that makes the [grammatical] definite indefinite is the literalists restricting such inessentials as vowel points to what is essential (zâtiye). This necessitates deny-