The Sufis kept their eyes fixed on esoteric aspects of creation; they were too occupied with their inner world to look at the outer one. Their tunnel-like vision prevented them from looking at the things in their true perspective. Their love of esoteric made them look for inner interpretations of the verses; without any regard to their manifest and clear meanings. It encouraged the people to base their explanations on poetic expressions and to use anything to prove anything. The condition became so bad that the verses were explained on the-basis of the numerical values of their words; letters were divided into bright and dark ones and the explanations were
\nbased on that division. Building castle in the air, wasn’t it? Obviously, the Qur\u2019\u00e3n was not revealed to guide the Sufis only; nor had it ad-dressed itself to only those who knew the numerical values of the letters (with all its ramifications); nor were its realities based on astrological calculations. Of course, there are traditions narrated from the Prophet and the Im\u00e3ms of Ahlu ‘l-bayt (a.s.) saying for example: \u201cVerily the Qur\u2019\u00e3n has an exterior and an interior, and its interior has an interior upto seven (or according to a version, seventy) interiors . . .\u201d But the Prophet and the Im\u00e3ms gave importance to its exterior as much as to its interior; they were as much concerned with its revelation as they were with its interpretation. We shall explain in the beginning of the third chapter, \u201cThe Family of `Imr\u00e3n”, that \u201cinterpretation\u201d is not a meaning against the manifest meaning of the verse. Such an
\ninterpretation should more correctly be called \u201cmisinterpretation”. This meaning of the word, \u201cinterpretation”,
\ncame in vogue in the Muslim circles long after the revelation of the Qur\u2019\u00e3n and the spread of Islam. What the Qur\u2019\u00e3n means by the word, \u201cinterpretation”, is some-thing other than the meaning and the significance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Sufis kept their eyes fixed on esoteric aspects of creation; they were too occupied with their inner world to look at the outer one. Their tunnel-like vision prevented them from looking at the things in their true perspective. Their love of esoteric made them look for inner interpretations of the verses; without any regard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[19407,19426,7563,10822],"class_list":["post-10435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-exegises","tag-interpretation","tag-quran","tag-shaistudies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shiastudies.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}