What Did God Intend to Say? Arabic Semantics as a Legal and Cognitive Enterprise

Abstract:This study addresses an interdisciplinary problem within the arena of Arabic linguistics and contemporary Islamic legal reform. With regard to linguistics, it aims to provide a non-legal version of Arabic semantics as elaborated in Islamic legal hermeneutics according to the Hanafī school of jurisprudence (fiqh). This semantic theory identified three main dimensions of textual meaning, namely the clarity and ambiguity of a statement's reference, the membership or scope of inclusion implied by a statement, and a statement's indirect meanings as discernible through techniques of indication, entailment, positive implication, and negative implication. With regard to Islamic legal reform, this article argues that Arabic lexicology and grammar are linguistically crucial but insufficient to determine textual meaning, and that the semantic meanings of sentences and texts weave a continuously expanding web that can only be adequately understood in reference to changing interpretative contexts. This article argues that textual meaning is always pluralistic, if not conflicted, and distinct from the mechanistic functioning of lexicology and grammar. Arabic semantic theory is additionally analyzed as a linguistic and cognitive instrument that responds to two alternative modes of Islamic scriptural hermeneutics, namely the literalist (zahir) and esoteric (bāṭinī) approaches to Qur'ānic exegesis. Textual meaning, or God's intended meaning, is controlled by a system that brings readers' minds to the associated assumptions, inferences, contraries, and indirect inferences in a complex web based on available human knowledge.