Ta'wil in the Qur'an

In the Qur'an, "ta'wil" means the outcome, the end to which a matter returns, and not "interpretation" as it became known among later scholars. Muhammad Rashid Rida explains this in the introduction to his commentary, citing a passage in Surat al-A'raf: Qur'an 7:53 ¹.

Rida holds that the interpreter should trace the technical terms that arose in the community after the first centuries, in order to distinguish them from what appears in the Book. He holds that the Qur'an should be explained by the meanings in use at the time of revelation, and that the interpreter should gather the repeated uses of a word in its various places in order to know its meaning there ¹.

These meanings have not yet been checked against the classical lexicons, nor against the views of exegetes on the meaning of ta'wil in Surat Al ʿImran.