On the Art of Ta’wil: The Pedagogy of Hermeneutics for Intercultural and Interfaith Dialogue

Abstract

While intercultural and interfaith dialogue in education is often framed in terms of tolerance, mutual understanding, active listening, and coexistence, these approaches often remain pedagogically underdeveloped. They do not sufficiently address the interpretive processes through which individuals negotiate meaning across cultural and religious differences. This article explores Ta’wil (تأويل) as a pedagogical hermeneutic for intercultural and interfaith dialogue. Rooted in Arabic Islamic intellectual traditions, Ta’wil is reconceptualized not merely as a method of textual interpretation but as a hermeneutics of return that seeks to recover the underlying purpose, first principle, or Ḥaqiqa that gives coherence to meaning. Through conceptual analysis, the study traces the etymological, philosophical, and Qur’anic foundations of Ta’wil. It draws on classical Muslim scholars, including Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, as well as the Qur’anic narrative of Moses and Al-Khiḍr. It argues that Ta’wil functions as a dialogical practice that moves beyond literalism by negotiating ambiguity and reconciling competing perspectives. How can Ta’wil be reconceptualized as a pedagogical hermeneutic for intercultural and interfaith dialogue in higher education? The article further situates Ta’wil within broader intercultural and interfaith conversations by identifying its resonance with parallel philosophical and theological traditions concerned with first principles, teleology, and the pursuit of truth. The paper advances a pedagogical model that operationalizes Ta’wil for higher education through three epistemological anchors: textual evidence, contextual teleological coherence, and intended meaning. The article proposes a pedagogical model with learning outcomes, implementation guidelines, and an assessment rubric. It concludes that Ta’wil contributes to a culturally responsible pedagogy through which educational encounters can move from the narrow paths of tension and misunderstanding toward the open terrains of deliberation, negotiated meaning, and deeper forms of understanding.

1. Introduction

Intercultural and interfaith dialogue in educational settings is often approached as a practice of tolerance, active listening, coexistence, or mutual understanding; however, such approaches may remain pedagogically superficial if they do not engage with a specific hermeneutical process through which students interpret meaning and address multicultural challenges (Keaten and Soukup 2009). This article explores how Ta’wil (تأويل), a hermeneutic practice, offers a transformative pedagogical framework for intercultural and interfaith dialogue through reflective interpretive praxis. Rooted in Arabic Islamic intellectual traditions, Ta’wil seeks not merely to explain a text, but to return meaning to its foundational source through contextual and relational interpretation. Ta’wil is invoked in interfaith and intercultural contexts because it emerged as a dialogical practice that enabled Muslim scholars to negotiate tensions between revelation and reason and to engage with foreign philosophical traditions. This paper examines Ta’wil, what it means and how it can be used to take interfaith and intercultural dialogue initiatives in schools and higher education beyond cultivating humility, tolerance, and ethical listening. How can Ta’wil become a pedagogical process? It argues that Ta’wil reframes dialogue as more than the civil exchange of fixed positions, treating it instead as a praxis in which meanings and assumptions are reconsidered and deliberated.

While mainstream models of intercultural competence, such as those by Byram (1997) and Deardorff (2009), highlight attitudes, knowledge, skills, and the capacity to act appropriately across cultures, they often remain procedurally focused and lack strong connections to local epistemologies (Matsuo 2012; R’boul et al. 2024). Drawing on Islamic intellectual traditions, Ta’wil is reconceptualized not only as exegesis but also as an ethical–communicative practice that mediates meaning across differences. Through conceptual analysis, the study outlines how Ta’wil can be operationalized as a mode of cultural episteme that transforms encounters from sites of tension into spaces of negotiated meaning. It suggests engaging with “culturally responsible pedagogy” (Abdul-Jabbar 2026, p. 2). Therefore, integrating such culturally embedded epistemes can deepen intercultural competence, which supports more meaningful and responsible interfaith dialogue. The article advances a conceptual and pedagogical model of Ta’wil.

This article treats intercultural and interfaith dialogue as closely aligned and, in many instances, overlapping forms of dialogical engagement. While they are not conceptually identical, both seek to foster mutual understanding, respect, coexistence, and constructive communication across differences. The intercultural dynamic is instrumental as a process of “acquiring increased awareness of subjective cultural context (world view), including one’s own, and developing greater ability to interact sensitively and competently across cultural contexts as both an immediate and long-term effect of exchange” (Bennett 2009, p. 2). On the other hand, interfaith dialogue can be defined as “an active encounter between groups of persons representing or belonging to diverse religious or spiritual traditions, both on individual and institutional levels, whose aim is to foster mutual understanding, cooperation and peaceful cohabitation” (Cibotaru 2023, p. 1). These definitions point to real differences: intercultural dialogue is mainly concerned with practices, norms, and ways of life, which can typically be described and negotiated without either party being asked to concede a truth claim. By contrast, interfaith dialogue involves competing, sometimes mutually exclusive, claims about ultimate reality that cannot be addressed by description alone. Treating the two as complementary here does not amount to a claim that this difference disappears. Rather, it is a claim that the same disciplined interpretive movement, such as identifying ambiguity, seeking textual and contextual evidence, and recovering an underlying purpose, can be brought to bear on both. However, one must consider that a negotiated accommodation in the intercultural case is possible, while an intra-traditional act of interpretation in the interfaith case needs to be sought, of the kind developed later in this article.

This approach treats interfaith and intercultural dialogues as constructively intersecting. For this reason, the distinction between the two is not always clear-cut and is not strictly maintained, and the two are therefore discussed here as complementary and, at times, interchangeable frameworks. Moreover, the dialogical approach is used because it “encourages reconciliatory practices such as personal interactions, interfaith ethics, and outcome-oriented thinking. In essence, it becomes an intercultural forum of epistemological engagement with ways of learning and universal values that drive students’ attitudes toward knowledge and positively inform their worldviews” (Abdul-Jabbar 2023, p. 44). This article, therefore, explores the conceptual framework of Ta’wil, its implementation, and its potential as a pedagogical model for addressing controversial issues and guiding intercultural and interfaith dialogue in the classroom.

This article proceeds by conceptual analysis rather than empirical fieldwork. It draws on primary and secondary texts to trace Ta’wil’s etymological, philosophical, and Qur’anic foundations, and identify points of theoretical resonance and tension. From that analysis, it constructs a transferable pedagogical model. The corpus is deliberately mixed. Classical sources, including the Qur’an, al-Ghazālī’s al-Mustaṣfā and Fadā’iḥ al-Bāṭiniyya, Ibn Rushd’s Faṣl al-Maqāl, and Ibn Taymiyyah’s Dar’ Taʿāruḍ al-‘Aql wa-l-Naql, were selected because they represent the central positions in Ta’wil’s internal disputes. They reflect both the disciplined and the contested uses of the practice, rather than a single school’s account of it. Moreover, materials of theoretical relevance to hermeneutics as such (Gadamer) and those standing within the intercultural competence literature this article positions itself against or alongside (Byram, Deardorff, Matsuo, R’boul, Barnawi, & Saidi) are included. No claim is made to exhaustiveness in either corpus. The selection is oriented toward constructing a functioning pedagogical model rather than a comprehensive survey of Ta’wil scholarship.

2. Ta’wil as a Hermeneutic of Return: Origins, Meaning, and First Principles

Ta’wil, often thought of as simply ‘interpretation,’ is better understood as a hermeneutic of return. Ta’wil originates from the verb awwala (أوّل), which literally means to return to the first source.

Ta’wil means to cause to return, to lead back to the origin, and thus to return to the true and original meaning of a written text. It is to cause something to arrive at its origin. He who practices Ta’wil, therefore, is someone who diverts what is proclaimed from its external appearance (its exoteric aspect or Ẓahir), and makes it revert to its truth, its haqiqah. (Corbin 2006, p. 12)

It is a movement of thought that aims to bring the text back to its origin, its ultimate meaning. Because of this, it resists reduction to mere “interpretation.” Etymologically, the term derives from the Arabic awwal (الأول), meaning “the first” and “the original.” In the Entry: “A-W-L,” Al-Khalil ibn Aḥmad Al-Farahidi (Al-Farahidi 1988), an 8th-century Arab philologist, explains that Ta’wil is the explanation of speech whose meanings differ, and it is valid only when it clarifies something other than its literal wording. Therefore, Ta’wil is not merely an attempt to produce a different reading; it also asserts a claim to recover the genesis, which provides the underlying principle for all subsequent meanings: “We may perceive the idea of an exodus, of a ‘flight out of Egypt’: an exodus out of metaphor and enslavement to the letter, out of exile and the Occident of the exoteric appearance, towards the orient of the original, hidden idea” (Corbin 2006, p. 12). Semantically, it involves two aspects: a hermeneutic gesture that seeks to uncover meanings beyond the surface and a teleological gesture that seeks to return to that first principle or meaning.

Grammatically it is an infinitive based on the tri-radical root of A-W-L. It has some family resemblance with Ta’bir and Ta’fsir. However, Ta’wil is quite different. Basically, it means referring or returning to the first place and taking something (here, a text) back to its beginning, that is to what was or could be originally intended. It could also suggest what are the implied meanings, the eventual, and the final outcome or ramifications. Thus, Ta’wil works in both directions, backward and forward (Motlagh 2012, p. 103).

Consequently, a “hermeneutic of return” might be a more precise way to describe it than simply calling it “interpretation.”

According to Al-Bushaykhi (1995), what triggers Ta’wil is a deficiency in meaning: “Ta’wil in the terminology of bayan (rhetorical clarification) is determining the intended meaning of an expression that potentially carries more than one meaning, because of deficiencies in explicit expression” (p. 9). Al-Azhari (n.d.) defines Ta’wil as the gathering of the meanings of a problematic statement to shift from ambiguity to clarity. This suggests the need to identify the sense of ambiguity that triggers Ta’wil. Therefore, there is no Ta’wil if there is no ambiguity. Likewise, Al-Qāsimī (2003) points out that ambiguity predetermines Ta’wil, “fa’inna al-mutabadar min al-lafẓ al-ḥaqiqah, wa-la yuṣaru ila al-majaz illa idha ta’adhara iradatuha” (p. 145). This suggests that evident meaning cannot be abandoned unless it proves to be impossible and that one cannot abandon textual meaning and engage in hypotheticals unless there is a well-founded, reasonable justification for that; merely seeking a different meaning because of personal preference does not constitute sufficient ground to count as one.

Interculturally, this interest in Ta’wil resonates strongly with the Greek philosophical search for first principles that is the attempt to uncover the originating cause, foundation, or underlying truth from which meaning emerges: “When Aristotle first presents us with the idea of a body of knowledge that focuses on first causes and first principles, he tells us that the body of knowledge will have a universal dimension” (Loux 2003, p. 167).1 This pursuit of a unified theory that teleologically seeks to capture the essence and primary causes of phenomena does not amount to a shared epistemological framework—Aristotle’s archē, Aquinas’s divine nature of existence, and Ta’wil’s Ḥaqiqa are not interchangeable answers to the same question. What these traditions share is not a common answer but a common orientation: a conviction that meaning is not exhausted by its surface appearance, and that inquiry is answerable to something beyond the interpreter’s preference. That shared orientation—not a shared first principle—is what makes cross-traditional dialogue about Ta’wil possible.

In Greek philosophy, especially in the pre-Socratics and later in Aristotle era, the “first principle” (archē) referred to the primary source or governing cause that gives coherence to existence and knowledge. This intellectual orientation later found strong expression in medieval Christian thought as well through questions of origin, causality, and ultimate truth. Speaking of the first principle within the Christian philosophical perspective, Joseph Owens explains that “the tendency reached its high point with St. Thomas Aquinas in the identification of the divine nature of existence” (Owens 2018, p. 189). A similar orientation resonated deeply among Muslim and Arab thinkers. Al-Kindi, a 9th-century Arab philosopher, for example, titled one of his major works Fi al-Falsafa al-Ula (On First Philosophy), with emphasis on the idea of al-awwal, the First, in his pursuit of an intercultural curriculum or Minhaj (Abdul-Jabbar 2020). In this sense, Ta’wil is not merely an interpretive activity; contextually, it reflects a sustained intellectual preoccupation across cultures and faiths with a return to origins, foundational causes, and the universality of knowledge—a nostos to the primordial site from which meaning first emerged.

It must be noted, however, that an intriguing paradox surfaces from within the etymological root. This quest to “return” suggests that the original meaning has been lost and that the current meaning has diverged from or misrepresented the original Awwal gist, which could be the cause of the current ambiguity. This assumption that something has gone astray is central to initiating Ta’wil; otherwise, why would one engage in Ta’wil if the accepted current meaning still holds its original intent? Ta’wil, therefore, operates under the premise that the apparent meaning—the Dhahir—is inadequate, and perhaps misleading, which requires a semantic and contextual transformation. It is paradoxical because it is a return through a departure. This sense of paradox is not a contradiction, but rather a displacement. Therefore, Ta’wil involves an understanding of displacement: it is a movement back, but also a movement beyond. It may manifest as a shift from the literal to the figurative, implying a move away from relying solely on Dhahir Al-ma’na, that is, the apparent, outward meaning. It serves to clarify the implicit meaning through grammar, pragmatics or historical context. Ta’wil, therefore, can signify a transitional transformation from the external to the internal, from the manifest (Dhahir) to the hidden implications (Baṭin).

This raises the central question: what is the “first source” to which Ta’wil returns? Does it refer to the author’s intention, to the text itself, in the structures of language, and rhetoric or is it tied to a historical and social frame of reference? Could it instead be in the mind of the reader, where meaning is realized through thought, imagination, and intuition? Or does it lie in reality and in lived human experience, where the signs of the world reflect the meanings of revelation? The paradox, then, is that while Ta’wil promises a return to the origin, that origin is never simply present. It must be sought, reasoned toward, or unveiled. Every act of returning is therefore also an act of reconstruction. Ta’wil aims at recovery and invention, memory and creativity. However, it does not remake meaning from scratch but recovers or restores it. This is how this article addresses Ta’wil. The pedagogical perspective demands that Ta’wil be used in a way that subscribes to the idea that seeing is believing, Ilm al-ayan, the direct knowledge of what is seen, even though this is hard to capture, and that it stays away from the perception that human knowing unfolds through ilm al-ẓann, speculative or hypothetical knowledge. Moosa (1995), for instance, argues that meaning in legal and hermeneutical discourse is not fixed but remains contingent upon evidentiary judgement:

Signifying speech (mufid) does not only occur in the form of explicit, apparent and indefinite denotation. [It] can also be uncertain and open to approximation. When meaning is measured in terms of the absence of certainty in legal theory it is called hermeneutics (Ta’wil). Hermeneutical statements (mu’awwal) measure vocables in terms of an economy of uncertainty. A Ta’wil interpretation occurs when an uncertainty is reinforced by an evidentiary indicant (dalil). The preponderance of this uncertainty has the effect of grossly undermining the apparent (Ẓahir) meaning of the vocable and destabilizing the essential meaning of the word or sentence (p. 118).

Ta’wil, therefore, initiates a transformation in generating meaning by destabilizing the (Ẓahir) meaning toward a more contingent and hermeneutical direction. However, contextual and teleological interpretation is invoked only when it successfully approximates evidentiary reasoning that destabilizes literal certainty.

A good case in point is how Al-Ghazali handles Ta’wil in a way that resists rigid literalism, that is, to depart from the apparent (Ẓahir) meaning of the statement without dismissing the authority of the textual tradition itself. In Al-Mustaṣfa min ‘Ilm al-Uṣul, Al-Ghazālī (1997) enters the debate over whether zakat on livestock must be paid in the way specifically explained in the prophetic tradition:

The prophetic tradition rules that for every 40 sheep, one sheep should be given in zakat—annual tax. Al-Shafi’i and his followers interpreted the rule literally, saying that the payment could only be in the form of sheep for sheep tax, goats for goat tax and camels for camel tax. They did not see the tax as being exchangeable. (Moosa 1995, p. 121).

However, Abu Ḥanifa, the 8th-century jurist and founder of the Hanafi school of thought, argued that the value of the tax was what truly mattered, not the literal form of the sheep itself. This is seen as a return to the main purpose of the ruling itself. Al-Ghazali supports this interpretive direction because it distinguishes between the essential principle of obligation, Maqṣad, and the contingent form through which that obligation is fulfilled: “[the] vocable (lafẓ) is an explicit denotation (naṣṣ) in so far as it established the principle of obligation. It is not a naṣṣ, in so far that it specifies and describes [how the obligation should be fulfilled]” (cited in Moosa 1995, p. 121). This statement is crucial because it demonstrates how Ta’wil transcends the specificity of surface-level literalism in search of an underlying rationale. In other words, the sheep is not treated as the ultimate end in itself, but it represents a measurable value. However, perhaps even more important, Al-Ghazali does not turn this hermeneutical shift into a polemical attack against Al-Shafi’i. He seeks to preserve intellectual dialogue. After adopting and elaborating on Abu Ḥanifa’s interpretive position, Al-Ghazali immediately explains that Al-Shafi’i preferred a literal reading, specifying that the command regarding sheep is devotional (ta’abbudi). This is significant because Al-Ghazali refuses to reduce hermeneutical disagreement to a binary opposition. Instead, Ta’wil becomes a dialogical and reconciliatory process. In this sense, al-Ghazali presents Ta’wil as a transformative mechanism for negotiating meaning, preserving interpretive plurality, sustaining intellectual conversation, and making sure that he eventually abolishes any rising antagonism. Ta’wil, therefore, belongs to the domain of reasoning, utility, and lived experience. It is an act of deliberative excavation: moving from the surface to the depth, from the literal to the teleological, and it seeks to become seen, not merely intuited.

3. On the Qur’anic Ta’wil: Framing Revelatory Teleology

In Qur’an 18:78, the term Ta’wil appears in a highly specific epistemic context: it follows a series of completed actions whose surface meanings (Ẓahir) have already been observed and morally judged by Moses. The story of Moses and Al-Khiḍr appears in the Qur’an not only to illustrate the limits of human knowledge, patience, and the capacity to interpret appearances, but also to demonstrate the interaction between a master and a disciple—a pedagogical moment. God informs Moses that there is a servant of God who possesses knowledge Moses needs to learn. Moses sets out to find him and eventually meets Al-Khiḍr. Moses asks permission to follow and learn from him. Al-Khiḍr warns Moses to be extremely patient, as he will witness actions whose meaning is not immediately apparent. They travel together, and Al-Khiḍr performs three troubling acts: first, he damages a boat belonging to poor fishermen; second, he kills a young boy; third, he repairs a collapsing wall in a town whose people were inhospitable. Moses is shocked each time and condemns the acts, but Al-Khiḍr reminds him of their agreement to wait and see. Moses is insistent and fails the test. At this point, Al-Khiḍr ends their companionship and explains the hidden reasons behind his actions: the boat was damaged to save it from a tyrannical king who was seizing every sound vessel; the boy would have grown up to become a source of misery and disbelief for his righteous parents; God intended to replace him with a better child; and under the wall was a concealed treasure belonging to two orphans, which repairing kept hidden until they reached maturity. The story distinguishes between apparent knowledge (Ẓahir) and hidden wisdom (Baṭin). Moses judges based on what is outwardly visible and morally apparent. Al-Khiḍr acts according to a deeper wisdom that Moses cannot yet perceive.2 This is why the story is frequently cited as a reference to the relationship between appearance and reality. In the context of Ta’wil, the story illustrates that the apparent meaning of an event may not exhaust its truth. What initially appears unjust or irrational may become intelligible only through a shift from the outward (Ẓahir) to the hidden (Baṭin), which requires patience, training, compliance, and observation. Moses was sent to Al-Khiḍr not to realize that Al-Khiḍr was in divine contact, but to ponder the implications, learn, and undergo a period of apprenticeship that precedes and preconditions the acquisition of the art of Ta’wil.

The statement, “And now I will tell thee of the Ta’wil of (those things) over which thou wast unable to hold patience” (18:78) conveys two main lessons: First, patience is a precondition for proper Ta’wil. Apprenticeship and training must run their course, and then things will begin to unfold as Khidr promised Moses. This suggests that Ta’wil is an art that can be acquired. Second, there is no shortage of description or detail in the narration; however, there is ambiguity in the actions at the moral, ethical, and reasonable levels that renders those seemingly unscrupulous actions unjustifiable. In other words, at face value, each act—damaging the boat, killing the boy, and repairing the wall—appears unjustifiable when judged solely by immediate cause. However, once the Ta’wil is disclosed, each action is revealed as oriented toward a specific end: protecting property, safeguarding faith, or preserving future inheritance. This mode of explanation aligns with teleology insofar as it prioritizes the end (telos) over the act’s immediate appearance.

In this case, Ta’wil does not function as linguistic interpretation or symbolic decoding; instead, Ta’wil becomes a process of deliberation not to be rushed in pursuit of the underlying rationale that justifies action beyond its ambiguous reality. What could have led Al-Khidr, a man of wisdom, to do these things instead of making an immediate judgement? The Qur’anic usage, therefore, positions Ta’wil as a method that uncovers the hidden logic that links a troubling reality to a broader order of meaning. Read in this way, Qur’anic Ta’wil functions not merely as an exegetical tool but as a methodological principle for meaning-making, where meaning is often relational, inferential, and oriented toward ends that may suggest a greater good.

The story of Moses and Al-Khiḍr serves not only as a foundational Qur’anic illustration of Ta’wil but also as an intercultural, philosophical and interfaith point of encounter. The Qur’anic narrative of Moses and Al-Khiḍr resonates dialogically with the Christian doctrines of providence articulated by Augustine and Aquinas, wherein seemingly harmful events acquire meaning when viewed within a larger divine order inaccessible to immediate human understanding. In Enchiridion, Augustine of Hippo argues that what appears evil or tragic may ultimately participate in a greater divine good that human beings cannot immediately perceive: “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist” (Augustine 1999, p. 83), which aligns with the Moses–Al-Khiḍr narrative. Just as Augustine maintains that God may permit apparent evil because it ultimately serves a higher good beyond immediate human perception, Al-Khiḍr’s actions reveal that harmful events may conceal purposes accessible only through divine knowledge. This teleological dimension reinforces the idea that Ta’wil is concerned less with interpretation as explanation-after-the-fact and more with re-establishing the conditions of intelligibility that precede and justify the act itself.

A closer methodological parallel may clarify what the two traditions hold about meaning and how each licences moving beyond a text’s literal sense. In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine distinguishes literal from figurative signification and then offers a rule for when a reader may move from one to the other: “whatever can be shown to be in its literal sense inconsistent either with purity of life or correctness of doctrine must be taken figuratively” (Augustine of Hippo 1997, trans. Bk. III). This is not a licence for unconstrained allegorization; it is a disciplined condition that triggers the move. It is structurally analogous to Ta’wil’s requirement that a text’s Ẓahir be genuinely ambiguous, textually or contextually inconsistent, before Baṭin may be sought. Whereas Ta’wil moves from apparent to underlying sense once ambiguity destabilizes the literal reading, Augustine moves from literal to figurative sense once the literal reading conflicts with doctrine or with the text’s evident moral purpose. In both cases, the move beyond the surface meaning is answerable to a rule and not arbitrary. Latin Christian exegesis formalized a fourfold sense of scripture, including literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical, as a structured method for recovering meaning beyond the letter (de Lubac [1959] 1998). Read alongside Ta’wil, these are not two paths converging on a shared hermeneutic. They are two independently disciplined traditions, each licencing its own move past the literal according to its own internal rule.

4. Conceptualizing Ta’wil as an Intercultural and Interfaith Hermeneutics

The history of Ta’wil (تأويل) partly illustrates how intercultural communication occurs through religious and philosophical encounters. Not only does this article explore how Ta’wil evolved as a means of reconciling the tension between revelation and reason and between the literal and the allegorical, but, most importantly, it examines how Ta’wil can serve as an intercultural skill in the classroom. In this context, Ta’wil serves as an interpretive framework which pedagogically engages with and reconciles foreign ideas and as a practice that rejects the dogmatic adoption of concepts. In this context, it subscribes to an interfaith, intercultural, dialogical approach that negotiates tensions and conflicts. Piller (2017) invites us to pay attention to how problematic human interactions can be: “interactants sometimes simply do not want to understand each other and that misunderstandings arise not only because of linguistic or cultural differences, but also because people fight and argue” (p. 155). For example, Muslim immigrants are often perceived as unable to integrate readily into the society of their receiving country due to an alleged incompatibility between Islamic values and other faiths or secular issues (Abdul-Jabbar 2022). Many Muslims find it challenging to respond with an honest, curious effort to understand anything they perceive as intrusive, foreign, or uncanny: “Another reason would be the xenophobic one of rejecting the foreign, of asserting a specifically Islamic identity which excludes other cultural frameworks, except perhaps those of the other people of the Book” (Leaman 2009, p. 30). This tension calls for intervention. This shift from aporia to episteme, from a moment-without-way to knowing, which potentially offers an opportunity to address and resolve conflict, calls for acting interculturally to seek moderation. Ta’wil is, therefore, presented here as the Islamic epistemic response to that moment of Aporia.

In this regard, Averroes (Ibn Rushd 2001, pp. 1126–98), a notable figure, serves as a good case in point. In Faṣl al-Maqal (The Decisive Treatise), he contends that Ta’wil should be applied when rational explanation and scripture appear to reach an impasse (Ibn Rushd 2001). For Averroes, allegorical interpretation enables the dialogue-driven reconciliation of reason with revelation. His approach shows how Ta’wil preserves the perspective of faith while providing a framework for philosophical discussion, especially in the context of an intercultural encounter with Greek thought. His commentaries, later translated into Latin, introduced this hermeneutic method into European scholasticism.3 In this way, Ta’wil transcends the conventional boundaries of interfaith or intercultural dialogue by engaging with foreign thought not merely to tolerate it but to see it as an opportunity for renewal. Ultimately, the art of Ta’wil exemplifies how hermeneutics can foster cross-cultural understanding. In its quest to find the original meaning, it creates a space for dialogue beyond its acceptable boundaries.

Ta’wil can therefore be conceptually connected to interfaith and intercultural dialogue in the sense that both involve an attempt to enter into the faith of another interpretive community, that is, to engage seriously with what another group holds to be true. The task is not merely to observe meaning from the outside, but to read into the faith invested in that meaning, to understand how others experience, justify, and live truth, which is the ultimate Maqṣad, purpose. Vachon (1998) defines intercultural contact as a quest of re-examining preconceived worldviews:

to experience another culture, to accept the truth of the other culture. It is therefore allowing the other culture and its truth to affect me directly, to penetrate me, to change me, to transform me, not only in my answers to a question, but in my very questions, my presuppositions, my myths. It is therefore a meeting in myself of two convictions.

(qtd. in UNESCO 2009, p. 45)

This transformation of the reader is not incidental to Ta’wil but constitutive of it. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of understanding as a fusion of horizons argues that interpretation is never a return to an already determined origin accessible or to be recovered independently of the interpreter’s own historically situated pre-understanding. In other words, the interpreter’s prejudgments, assumptions and prejudices are the very condition under which understanding becomes possible at all (Gadamer [1960] 1989, pp. 302–7). Read through this lens, Ta’wil’s “return” to Ḥaqiqa should not be mistaken for a reconstruction of authorial intent that proceeds independently of the reader. What is returned to is not recovered by a neutral instrument; it is reached only through the interpreter’s own horizon, that is, their questions, presuppositions, and myths, in Vachon’s terms, being brought into contact with, and altered by, the horizon of the text. Ta’wil, on this account, does not compete with Gadamer’s fusion of horizons; it names one culturally specific and religiously grounded mode of enacting it. The pedagogical model developed below therefore does not treat the interpreter’s own standpoint as something to set aside before real interpretation can begin. It treats that standpoint as one of the model’s necessary components. It is as important as the text, its context, and its intended meaning because without a reader who brings their own questions and assumptions to the text, there is no one to do the returning, and therefore no return.

Such an endeavour triggers Ta’wil, which does not require absolute agreement, nor does it promote a total rupture from the original meaning. Rather, it represents an interpretive movement that departs from an existing understanding yet remains ethically connected to it, because its aim is the pursuit of a deeper or more adequate understanding of truth (Ḥaqiqa). In this sense, dialogue becomes a site of transformation, a process of reconfiguration through interpretive engagement. Ta’wil, therefore, may be understood as a hermeneutical mode of interfaith and intercultural dialogue.

The paper acknowledges that Ta’wil is among the most contested concepts in Islamic intellectual history. It has generated enduring debates over the limits of interpretation and the extent to which meanings may legitimately extend beyond the apparent wording of a text:

In short, while doing Ta’wil people do not need to take the texts literally. When applying Ta’wil to a text, it becomes open to interpretation, and because of this, the word Ta’wil itself is a major source of polemic among Islamist scholars, in particular when understanding the teachings of Islam in general (Motlagh 2012, p. 103).

That contestation is not incidental to the concept but part of its history. The sharpest instance is the medieval controversy surrounding Bāṭinī and Ismāʿīlī hermeneutics, in which Ta’wil was used to subordinate the apparent (ẓāhir) sense of the Qur’an and Sunna to esoteric (bāṭin) meanings accessible only through an infallible Imam, a discourse that used ta’wil unconstrained by textual or linguistic discipline. Notably, Al-Ghazālī devoted an entire treatise, Fada’ih al-Bāṭiniyya wa Fada’il al-Mustazhiriyya to refuting it. He argued that it dissolved the binding force of revelation and religious obligation altogether (Al-Ghazālī 1999). A second, related controversy concerns philosophical Ta’wil of the kind Ibn Rushd defends in the Decisive Treatise: he argued that when demonstrative, syllogistic reason appears to contradict the scripture’s literal or apparent sense, Ta’wil is not merely permitted but obligatory for those capable of philosophical demonstration, since truth cannot contradict truth (Ibn Rushd 2001). This move, which entails subordinating a text’s apparent sense to an external standard of rational demonstration, was itself the target of sustained traditionalist critique. Perhaps the first that comes to mind is Ibn Taymiyyah’s Dar’ Ta’arud al-‘Aql wa’l-Naql, which was written directly against the Ash’arī theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s rule, “universal rule” (Al-qanun al-kulli) that reason must take precedence over scripture in cases of apparent conflict (El-Tobgui, 2020). Notably, Ibn Taymiyyah’s broader critique of subordinating scripture to reason encompassed the philosophers as well.

In short, when the interpreter’s discipline is not tightly bound to text and language, Ta’wil has historically served not dialogue but its opposite: an unaccountable means of overriding a text’s plain sense in favour of whatever the interpreter, or the authority behind the interpreter, needed it to say. This is precisely the history that the epistemological anchors above are designed to guard against. The article deliberately builds its pedagogical model on the disciplined, textually and linguistically constrained strand of Ta’wil, exemplified by Ibn Rushd’s insistence that Ta’wil remain bound to “the conventions of Arabic language and rhetoric” (Ibn Rushd 1997, p. 97). Such an approach is pedagogically functional not because the contested, esoteric, or unconstrained uses of Ta’wil are historically marginal. Far from it, it is because a pedagogical model for the classroom cannot responsibly adopt a version of the practice whose own tradition accused it of dissolving textual and religious accountability altogether. The choice of the irenic strand is therefore not a silence about the contested history of Ta’wil, but a considered response to it.

Therefore, it conceptualizes the hermeneutical Ta’wil as positioning truth (Ḥaqiqa) neither as reducible to the literal text nor as completely divorced from it. The truth may exist beyond the text, though never entirely without it. Ta’wil identifies an ambiguity in the text’s apparent wording and then seeks to demystify it by recovering the first principle through the intended meaning and its context. Thus, Ta’wil is neither a rejection of the text nor a replacement, but a dialogical movement aimed at capturing the first principle, Ḥaqiqa, more fully, on the assumption that we have lost sight of it. Epistemologically, hermeneutics of return rests upon three interrelated assertions: First, it presupposes that Ḥaqiqa (truth or ultimate meaning) is, at least in principle, attainable and therefore rejects radically postmodern or relativist conceptions of meaning as indefinite or indeterminate. Second, it establishes that texts contain an intended meaning that may not always be immediately visible at the surface level. It may extend beyond the immediate and literal dimensions of the text, and it never loses sight of the textual centre itself. The movement of interpretation is therefore expansive rather than arbitrary: it may reach beyond the text’s apparent meaning, yet it remains anchored to the text and oriented toward the first principle from which meaning ultimately derives.

Third, it assumes that there are legitimate interpretive pathways through which this intended meaning may be approached, even if never captured in absolute finality.

Bounding the Claim: Ta’wil Between Traditions

This raises a question the model must answer rather than presuppose: in an interfaith or intercultural encounter, whose Maqṣad governs? If two interpreters from different traditions apply Ta’wil to the same encounter, what prevents one interpreter’s return from quietly absorbing the other’s meaning into their own teleology?

The claim advanced here is limited rather than universal. Ta’wil, as developed in this article, is an intra-traditional practice: it operates within a tradition’s own textual canon, linguistic norms, and interpretive constraints. This is precisely what the anchors of textual evidence and contextual teleological coherence are for. They exist to prevent Ta’wil from importing a teleology the text itself does not licence. Such a discipline is already evident in Ibn Rushd’s insistence that Ta’wil remain governed by “the conventions of Arabic language and rhetoric” (Ibn Rushd 1997, p. 97) rather than by the interpreter’s preference. When extended to interfaith and intercultural dialogue, Ta’wil does not become a neutral method standing above both traditions. It is not a mechanism authorized to determine whose Ḥaqiqa is correct. It becomes something more modest: each party practices Ta’wil within their own tradition, in view of the other. The encounter is a meeting between two disciplined acts of return, not a merger of two teleologies into one.

No single Maqṣad governs the interfaith encounter, because no interpreter’s Ta’wil authorizes them to adjudicate a tradition that is not their own. What governs is the discipline internal to each act of return, which, per the fourth anchor above, requires interpreters to name their own horizon rather than treat it as universal. This is what keeps dialogical Ta’wil from becoming assimilation. In other words, the interpreter recovers Ḥaqiqa for their own tradition, in dialogue with the other’s account of theirs, not on the other’s behalf. The dialogue is the encounter between two bounded returns, not necessarily a shared third truth either side is asked to declare.

5. Operationalizing Ta’wil as a Pedagogical Model

5.1. Epistemological Anchors of Ta’wil

This article proposes moving Ta’wil from a theory of interpretation to a teachable hermeneutical practice for intercultural or interfaith dialogue in higher education. So, to proceed pedagogically, we need to keep three epistemological anchors clearly in view. The first is textual evidence. There must remain some resonance with the text itself, so that the student’s attempt at interpretation does not become entirely far-fetched or detached from the textual basis. So even as we move beyond the surface meaning, these two anchors should remain visible and connected throughout the interpretive process: “The text possesses meanings other than the sense apparent in the written word. These other meanings are not something artificially ‘read into’ the text by the spirit, but correspond to an initial perception as irrefutable as the perception of a sound or a colour” (Corbin 2006, p. 13). Teachers ask the student, for example, what textual evidence supports their interpretation and how that evidence remains directly connected to the text itself. In other words, their Ta’wil should be a shift but not a drift.

The second epistemological anchor is determined by contextual teleological coherence. Ta’wil should therefore also remain anchored in context. What we may call the teleological meaning, the intended purpose or direction of the text should be gathered through contextual analysis, whether historical, linguistic, cultural, or intellectual. Their Ta’wil must continue to somehow reconcile itself with that context rather than contradict it. The articulation of the second issue may, in turn, determine the third.

The third epistemological anchor is the intended meaning, that is, the issue of purpose. How is your Ta’wil linked to a first principle? The objective is not simply to desire or impose a different meaning, but rather to guide the text back toward its intended teleological meaning: its purpose, cause, or intention.

The fourth epistemological anchor is the interpreter’s horizon: the situated commitments, presuppositions, and prior understandings the student brings to the text, which Ta’wil requires the student to identify, acknowledge and then examine. We cannot assume that it can be readily suspended. This anchor does not compete with the other three; it conditions how they are used. A student’s sense of what counts as sufficient textual evidence, what a plausible teleological reading looks like, or what the “intended meaning” will be eventually determined by where the student already stands. Naming that standpoint is not a preliminary clear-cut exercise before the real interpretive work begins. It is part of the interpretive work because a Ta’wil that has not accounted for the reader’s own horizon cannot distinguish a genuine return to Ḥaqiqa from the reader’s prior assumptions.

5.2. Learning Outcome

Students will be able to:

• Identify ambiguity that warrants interpretation.
• Distinguish between Ẓahir (apparent meaning) and Baṭin (deeper implication).
• Justify interpretive claims through evidence rather than preference.
• Trace a text, event, or cultural practice back to its underlying purpose (Maqṣad).
• Engage dialogically with competing interpretations.
• Apply Ta’wil to intercultural and interfaith tensions.
• Name and examine one’s own presuppositions, commitments, and prior horizon as a condition of interpretation, not an obstacle to it.

Students need to address the following questions:

• What do I already assume about this text before I begin? Where does that assumption come from?
• What is the literal meaning of the text?
• Have you identified any ambiguity?
• In what sense does your interpretation depart from the apparent or face value meaning?
• In what sense is your interpretation textual? What evidence from the text supports it? Have you grounded your Ta’wil in the actual wording, imagery, and textual structure or have you strayed too far from the text?
• In what sense is your interpretation contextual? How does the surrounding context justify or sustain it?

5.3. The Pedagogical Model for the Art of Ta’wil

Students should engage with the following instructional model, transforming Ta’wil into a hermeneutic for intercultural and interfaith dialogue.

Stage 1: Encounter the Text

Classroom Exercise

Teachers to present: (I advise teachers to be culturally and religiously responsible and sensible in their choices, offering students a number of options and asking whether one or two topics are inappropriate or too controversial to discuss in class).

• A controversial statement.
• A cultural conflict.

Students first engage with a statement, practice, belief, or cultural position without immediately judging it. This could be a religious claim, a cultural norm, a political statement or a controversial worldview. The goal is descriptive understanding first. The denotative meaning needs to be evident first.

Stage 2: Ambiguity Recognition: From Ẓahir to Baṭin

Students distinguish between Ẓahir (what appears obvious) and Baṭin (what deeper rationale may exist.)

Core Question

Why is Ta’wil needed?

Students learn:

• No ambiguity = no Ta’wil.
• Interpretation begins when meaning becomes problematic.
• Ambiguity is the trigger.

Then teachers ask:

What exactly is unclear?

Before engaging in interpretations, students need to identify:

• Ambiguity.
• Tension.
• Contradiction.

Uncertainty.

Stage 3: Enter the Faith of Meaning

• 3a. Surface your own horizon, first. Before attempting to inhabit another’s position, students name their own:

• What do I already assume about this text, practice, or belief, before I begin interpreting it?
• Where do my own upbringing, commitments, or prior encounters shape what I find plausible or implausible here?
• What questions am I not asking because of what I already believe?
• If my own presuppositions were different, how might my reading of this text change?

• 3b. Then, inhabit the other’s horizon. Students attempt to understand:

• Why does this community believe this?
• What truth does this meaning protect?
• What fear, value, or worldview sustains it?
• What would make this position internally coherent?

This stage is marked by hermeneutical agreement on both sides of the encounter, that is, the student’s own horizon as much as the text’s. It is epistemological inhabitation, but a mutual one: the student’s presuppositions are as much in question as the text’s meaning.

Stage 4: Contextualizing Maqṣad?

When placed in groups or pairs, students are assigned to analyze historical context, power relations, linguistic assumptions, emotional/social conditions, and cultural memory. Meaning becomes contextualized rather than just critiqued or caricatured.

Teachers ask:

What is the Maqṣad?

Students identify a teleological value that is an underlying principle that initiated or provoked the text into existence:

• Rule.
• Purpose.
• First principle.

Then, they decide how, for instance, the rule might apply in new intercultural or interfaith contexts.

Question:

What evidence justifies departing from the literal meaning?

• Context.
• Linguistic evidence.
• Historical evidence.
• Rational justification.

This is perhaps the most important skill in the entire model.

Stage 5: Recovering Intended Meaning

At this stage, students attempt to recover an intended meaning that was not immediately visible at the literal or surface level of the text.

Only after interpretive engagement do students respond critically.

But the response must:

• Remain to a certain extent connected to the text, aspiring for the original meaning (remember it is a shift not a drift).
• Avoid total rupture.
• Attempt deeper understanding.
• Propose reinterpretation rather than dismissal.

This is an attempt where intercultural and interfaith dialogue becomes transformative rather than adversarial. Even when the text appears antagonistic, exclusionary, or adversarial, the task of Ta’wil is to move deeper into the interpretive structure of the text in search of a meaning that restores intelligibility, coherence, or human understanding, while remaining attuned to an intercultural and interfaith perspective.

Pedagogically, the aim is not to erase disagreement or deny textual tension, but to ask:

• What deeper intention may underlie the surface wording?
• Is there an ethical, spiritual, or existential concern beneath the antagonism?
• What human fear, aspiration, anxiety, or moral vision is being protected by adhering to the surface meaning?
• Can the text be interpreted in a way that remains faithful to its anchors while producing greater understanding rather than rupture?

In this sense, Ta’wil becomes a reconstructive hermeneutical act. The interpreter does not abandon the text, but returns to it repeatedly in pursuit of a meaning that resonates more deeply with both the originator and the contemporary reader. The movement is circular rather than linear: from text, to intention, to context, and back again toward a recovered meaning that brings the possibility of understanding closer to Ḥaqiqa, the first principle. One must note that this circular structure is not unique to Ta’wil. In a religiously and linguistically specific register, it resonates with what Gadamer, following Heidegger, calls the hermeneutic circle: the recognition that understanding a text’s parts requires a prior sense of its whole, which entails that the whole itself is revised through engagement with the parts (Gadamer [1960] 1989, pp. 291–300). Ta’wil’s movement “from text, to intention, to context, and back again” enacts this circle, disciplined by the epistemological anchors described above rather than left open-ended.

5.4. Illustrative Application: The Zakat on Livestock Case

To show the model operating as a sequence rather than as five separate concepts, this section applies its stages to a single text discussed above: the ḥadith prescribing zakat on livestock, one sheep due for every 40, and the divergent readings of al-Shāfiʿī and Abū Ḥanīfa (Moosa 1995, p. 121):

• Stage 1 (Encounter the Text). Students encounter the ḥadith as it stands: for every forty sheep, one sheep is due in zakat.
• Stage 2 (Ambiguity Recognition). Students note the apparent (Ẓahir) reading, that is payment must be made in sheep, for sheep, set against Abū Ḥanīfa’s competing claim that value, not livestock, is what the ruling actually requires. The disagreement between two established jurists is itself the evidentiary indicant (dalīl) that destabilizes any assumption that the Ẓahir reading is self-evidently correct (Moosa 1995, p. 118).
• Stage 3 (Enter the Faith of Meaning). Before adjudicating between al-Shāfiʿī and Abū Ḥanīfa, students first name their own priors: do they arrive assuming that ritual specificity, that is, a particular animal, a particular substance, matters more than economic substance, or the reverse, and why? They then inhabit each jurist’s position in turn: what does al-Shāfiʿī’s literalism protect (fidelity to the Prophet’s precise wording)? What does Abū Ḥanīfa’s abstraction protect (accessibility and equity for a payer without livestock)?
• Stage 4 (Contextualizing Maqṣad; Purpose). Students ask what the obligation is for. Al-Ghazālī’s own answer is that the vocable “established the principle of obligation” but did not fix “how the obligation should be fulfilled” (Moosa 1995, p. 121). This reframes the dispute: the ruling’s Maqṣad is the transfer of wealth to those in need, not the species of animal itself.
• Stage 5 (Recovering Intended Meaning). Students return to the text able to state a defensible Ta’wil: the sheep is a contingent instrument of an enduring obligation, not the obligation itself. Accordingly, Abū Ḥanīfa’s ruling that value may substitute for kind is a disciplined recovery of that obligation’s underlying purpose. It is disciplined, not invented or inverted, because it remains textually grounded (in the vocable’s function, per al-Ghazālī) and contextually coherent (with the ruling’s evident aim).
• Considering the model’s four epistemological anchors: textual evidence surfaces in Stage 2, contextual teleological coherence and intended meaning appear in Stages 4 and 5, and the interpreter’s horizon is made explicit rather than assumed in Stage 3. The same sequence, when applied to the Qur’anic narrative of Moses and Al-Khiḍr discussed earlier, or to any text whose apparent meaning students find contested, follows an identical structure: encounter, ambiguity, self- and other-examination, purpose, and recovery.

Guides for Implementations:

To implement Ta’wil properly, the following conditions must be met:

• Identified ambiguity.
• The word being interpreted must semantically allow for the intended meaning. Thus, interpretations that have no basis in language or reason are invalid.
• The context must allow for it, and there must be evidence that the intended meaning is the one that is interpreted.
• The proof for interpretation must not be contradicted by stronger evidence. If any of these conditions are missing, the interpretation is invalid.

Table 1. Assessment rubric for Ta’wil.

Criterion	Excellent (4)	Good (3)	Developing (2)	Beginning (1)
Ambiguity recognition	Clearly identifies interpretive tension, ambiguity, contradiction, or uncertainty that necessitates Ta’wil.	Identifies ambiguity or interpretive tension, but with limited precision or clarity.	Partial recognition of ambiguity; source of tension remains unclear.	Little or no recognition of ambiguity requiring interpretation.
Ẓahir–Baṭin analysis	Sophisticated and well-supported distinction between surface (Ẓahir) and deeper (Baṭin) meanings, illustrated with clear examples.	Clear distinction between Ẓahir and Baṭin meanings with appropriate examples.	Limited distinction between surface and deeper meanings.	Confuses or conflates Ẓahir and Baṭin concepts.
Evidence use and justification for Ta’wil	Interpretation is supported by multiple forms of evidence (textual, contextual, historical, linguistic, and/or rational).	Interpretation is supported by relevant evidence, though not consistently integrated.	Limited or weak use of evidence to justify interpretation.	Interpretation relies primarily on unsupported opinion.
First principle (Maqṣad/Ḥaqiqa) identification	Accurately identifies and explains the underlying purpose, value, or first principle informing the text.	Correctly identifies a plausible Maqṣad or Ḥaqiqa but explanation lacks depth or precision.	Demonstrates partial understanding of the underlying purpose or principle.	Unable to identify a meaningful underlying purpose or first principle.
Reflexive awareness of interpreter’s horizon	Clearly identifies own presuppositions, commitments, or prior horizon, and explains specifically how they shaped the interpretation offered.	Identifies own presuppositions or commitments, with some connection to the interpretation offered.	Acknowledges having a perspective, but does not connect it to specific interpretive choices.	Treats own perspective as neutral or irrelevant to the interpretation; no reflexive awareness shown.
Recovery of intended meaning	Recovers an intended meaning that remains closely connected to the text while demonstrating interpretive depth and coherence.	Recovers a plausible intended meaning that is generally connected to the text.	Interpretation is only partially connected to the text’s intended meaning.	Interpretation is disconnected from the text or lacks coherence.

presents an assessment rubric for evaluating the application of Ta’wil according to these conditions.

6. Final Thoughts

This article explores Ta’wil as a pedagogical hermeneutic for intercultural and interfaith dialogue. Rooted in Arabic Islamic intellectual traditions, Ta’wil seeks to move beyond the apparent meanings of texts, practices, and beliefs to uncover their underlying purpose, first principle, or Ḥaqiqa. The article conceptualizes Ta’wil as a hermeneutics of return, a disciplined effort to resolve ambiguity through textual evidence, contextual understanding, and teleological reasoning. In this sense, Ta’wil transforms dialogue into an inquiry into meaning rather than a mere exchange of views. Because that inquiry proceeds only through the interpreter’s own horizon, Ta’wil transforms the interpreter as much as it recovers the text’s Ḥaqiqa. It is dialogue in the fullest sense, that is, with two sides, not one. The article offers students a structured process for engaging with cultural and religious differences. Rather than approaching disagreement as a problem to be eliminated, Ta’wil encourages learners to identify alternative perspectives, examine the assumptions that sustain them, and seek the underlying values that give them coherence. It equips learners with intercultural competence grounded in a culturally embedded epistemology. It neither demands complete agreement nor permits unrestricted relativism because each interpreter’s Ta’wil remains bounded by their own tradition’s textual and normative constraints, even as it opens toward dialogue with another’s. Instead, it assumes that meanings are anchored in texts, contexts in order to offer a locally grounded yet universally relevant framework for fostering meaningful forms of intercultural and interfaith dialogue: “Medieval ulama would suggest that much of the violence and extremism found in the Muslim world results precisely from unlearned Muslims deciding to break with tradition and approach their religion … ‘by scripture alone’” (Brown 2014, p. 7). The aim is to transform intercultural and interfaith encounters from sites of misunderstanding and antagonism into opportunities for reflective inquiry.

Preserving local cultural heritage across diverse contexts represents one of the most iconoclastic challenges to the dominance of the Western approach to the internationalization of education. The movement of Ta’wil in this model is not adversarial but reconciliatory and hermeneutical. The goal is to return to an intended meaning that may lie beneath a dogmatic surface. Ta’wil serves to integrate what is useful while remaining faithful to foundational principles. Second, it departs from literariness and literalism. It is a transformative method because it transcends the literal, surface-level reading of cultural conflict and looks for underlying, reconcilable layers of meaning. Third, it is a hermeneutical link. Figuratively, Ta’wil maintains a return to authentic meaning, a circular movement. The wheel returns. It revisits. It circles back. It does not simply depart from the text; it moves through text, intention, and context repeatedly in pursuit of a more coherent apprehension of Ḥaqiqa; the wheel of Ta’wil.