Interpretation and Its Critics

The affirmation distinguishes the esoteric streams of Islam from strictly literalist readings, which fear that unrestrained allegory dissolves the law's binding force; the esoteric traditions reply that the outer and inner are complementary, the law remaining in force while the heart seeks its meaning. Ismailis developed the science of tawil (esoteric exegesis) most systematically, Sufis expressed it through the language of love and unveiling, and Alevis read the Quran through the person and example of Ali. The belief thus names a shared hermeneutic held, in different keys, by several traditions.

The esoteric hermeneutic drew sustained polemical attack from literalist scholars, most forcefully the fourteenth-century jurist Ibn Taymiyyah, who argued that batini interpretation, left unchecked, could be used to explain away any plain legal or doctrinal requirement of the text and so functioned, in his view, as a solvent of the shariah rather than its deepening; his critique targeted Ismaili thought specifically but was extended by later followers of his school to Sufi esoteric exegesis more broadly. Defenders of the esoteric approach have generally responded that recognizing an inner meaning was never meant to suspend the outer law's binding force, only to add a further, complementary dimension of understanding for those spiritually prepared to receive it.