What a text plainly says is not the whole of what it means, but it is never optional either.
Sacred texts tend to get read in one of two incompatible ways: purely literally, with no room for depth, or purely symbolically, with no anchor in the words actually written. Traditions that try to hold both readings at once are often assumed to be simply inconsistent.
In Islamic hermeneutics, zahir (ظاهر) names the outer, apparent, literal sense of a Qur’anic verse, recovered through tafsir, the standard discipline of exegesis working from grammar, context, and precedent. This is contrasted with batin, the text’s inner or hidden meaning, which later thought, especially Sufi and Shi’a hermeneutics, associated with ta’wil, interpretation that moves beyond the literal toward a symbolic or spiritual register.
Classical scholars, including Ibn ‘Ajībah, held that the zahir is not discarded once a batin reading is found. The apparent meaning is the necessary basis the deeper one is built from, not a lower rung to be climbed past and left behind.
Source: Kristin Zahra Sands, Sufi Commentaries on the Qur’an in Classical Islam (Routledge, 2006).