"The medieval poet and mystic Rumi (d. 672/1273) wrote:

The interpretation of the sacred text is true

if it stirs you to hope, activity and awe;

and if it makes you slacken your service,

know the real truth to be this:

it is a distortion of the sense of the saying, not a true interpretation.

This saying has come down to inspire you to serve -

that God may take the hands of those who have lost hope.

Ask the meaning of the Qur'an from the Qur'an alone,

and from that one who has set fire to his idle fancy and burned it away,

and has become a sacrifice to the Qur'an, bowing low in humbleness,

so that the Qur'an has become the essence of his spirit.

The essential oil that has utterly devoted itself to the rose.

You can smell either that oil or the rose, as you please.

[fn 2: The Pocket Rumi Reader, ed. Kabir Helminski (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2001), 171; I have made minor changes to the translation.]

-from The Story of the Qur'an: Its History and Place in Muslim Life by Dr. Ingrid Mattson, pg. 221