First Principle

After embracing Islam, some scholars from among the Banī IsrāīlChildren of Israel; dhe descendants of Prophet Yaqūb (as), who was also known as Israel. They are frequently mentioned in the Qur’an as a people to whom Allah sent numerous prophets. also brought with them their former knowledge, and unconsciously attributed that knowledge to Islam. That knowledge, however, contained certain errors. These errors are to be attributed to them, not to Islam.

Second Principle

When comparisons and metaphors pass from the elite to the common people—that is, when they pass from the hands of scholars into the hands of the ignorant—they are, over time, taken as literal realities.

For example, when I was a child, a lunar eclipse occurred. I asked my mother: “Why has the moon become like this?”

She said: “A snake has swallowed it.”

I said: “But the moon is still visible.”

She replied: “The snakes up there are transparent; they show what is inside them.”

For a long time I remembered this incident from my childhood and wondered how such an unfounded superstition could have been accepted by a serious woman like my mother. Only when I studied astronomy did I understand that people like my mother had taken a figurative comparison for reality.

For when the great circle of the sun, also known as the zodiac, and the orbit of the moon intersect, two arcs are formed. The astronomers, with a subtle comparison, called these two arcs tinnīneyn, meaning “the two serpents.” One intersection of these two circles they called the ra’s, the head, and the other the dhanab, the tail. When the moon is at the head and the sun at the tail, what is termed in astronomical language haylūlat-i ard occurs; that is, a lunar eclipse.

In other words, the earth comes exactly between the sun and the moon. At that moment a lunar eclipse takes place. This elevated and scientific comparison, when it entered common speech, was over time transformed into the image of a gigantic serpent swallowing the moon.

In the same way, the two great angels connected with the earth were designated, through an elevated and meaningful metaphor, by the names sawrox and hūtfish. When this prophetic language entered ordinary usage, the metaphor was taken as literal reality, as though it truly referred to an enormous ox and a gigantic fish.

Third Principle

Just as the Qur’an has its mutashābihātExpressions, statements, or matters whose meanings are not immediately clear, may allow multiple interpretations, or whose true nature and full meaning may be known only to Allah., its verses of multiple or allegorical meaning, and teaches very profound matters to the common people through comparisons and metaphors, so too hadithA report of the sayings, actions, or approvals of Prophet Muhammed (pbuh). has its mutashābihātExpressions, statements, or matters whose meanings are not immediately clear, may allow multiple interpretations, or whose true nature and full meaning may be known only to Allah., in which deep truths are expressed through familiar and accessible comparisons.