Verbal similarity in the Qur'an (al-mutashabih al-lafzi)

al-Zarkashi calls the fifth type of al-Burhan 'the science of the mutashabih', defining it as giving one story in different forms and with different verse-endings, most common in the stories and reports. ¹ It is not the ambiguous as opposed to the clear. Its wisdom, for him, is the varied handling of speech and its delivery in different ways, to show the Arabs their inability to match it in any of those ways, whether first stated or repeated. ¹

Al-Zarkashi says several wrote on it: al-Sakhawi put it in verse; al-Kirmani explained it in his al-Burhan, al-Razi in Durrat al-Ta'wil, and Abu Ja'far ibn al-Zubayr in the fullest of them, in two volumes. ¹ The editor's note cites al-Suyuti that al-Razi's book is better than al-Kirmani's and Milak al-Ta'wil better than both, and mentions Ibn Jama'a's Kashf al-Ma'ani an Mutashabih al-Mathani and Zakariyya al-Ansari's Fath al-Rahman. ¹

Al-Zarkashi divides it, by single items, into kinds, the first being that wording comes in one order in one place and reversed in another, resembling the figure of returning the end to the beginning, frequent in the Qur'an; he illustrates it from places in al-Baqara, al-A'raf, al-Hajj, Al Imran, al-An'am, al-Isra', al-Kahf and elsewhere, where a word comes first in one place and later in another. ^{1 2}