كَمَثَلِ الْحِمَارِ يَحْمِلُ أَسْفَارًا
Like a donkey carrying books.
This passage from Qur’an 62:5 offers a powerful example of representational comparison. The point is not merely to compare a person with a donkey; it is the condition of bearing learned books without benefiting from their content.
The common respect is not a simple sensory feature such as colour or size. It emerges from the conjunction of carrying books and failing to profit from their knowledge. Reducing the passage to a bare comparison between human and animal loses its rhetorical force.