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Majāz al-qur'ān: periphrastic exegesis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
Extract
As a normative discipline Qur'anic exegesis shares both principles and terminology with the other Islamic sciences, and as such is not likely to have been articulated before the third/ninth century. Prominent in the fully elaborated system, as for example exhibited in the work of al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1143), are the complementary principles of qiyās and taqdīr. While the former is commonly understood to represent the hermeneutical instrument called analogy, a typological description of qiyās will distinguish between applications of the principle which depend upon a textual similarity, and those which are derived from a rational or causal relation. Of the first type it may be said that there are as many kinds of analogy as there are means of establishing external (grammatical and lexical) affinity between different scriptural contexts. Underlying the second type of analogy is a unifying principle (ratio) independent of textual similarities, both explicit and implicit. In theory, if not always in practice, one may differentiate the two types of qiyās by reference to the incidence in each of what I have called the complementary principle of taqdīr. This term, of which the most common rendering ‘supplementation’ (Ergänzung), alluding to only one aspect of the procedure in question, is not quite satisfactory, signifies reconstruction or restoration (Wiederherstellung: restitutio in integrum), namely, of a scriptural context or passage. Now, while the elaboration of grammatical qiyās by the so-called ‘Basran school’ was characterized by an almost unlimited application of that principle, two reservations must be made.
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- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 1970 , pp. 247 - 266
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References
1 See Goldziher, I., Die Ẓāhiriten, Leipzig, 1884, passim, but esp. 11, 41, 48, 56, 91–3, 184Google Scholar. In ch. iv of my forthcoming book, Qur'anic studies, a description of exegetical, as opposed to hermeneutical, qiyās is essayed. In the following pages discussion will be limited to the devices employed by exegetes to establish textual similarities as a basis for application of qiyās, and more especially to their methods of ‘textual restoration’.
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5 Ḥillāwī, Nāṣir, in his A study of Abū ‘Ubaida Ma'mar ibn al-Muthannā as a philologist and transmitter of literary material (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1966), 306–59Google Scholar, renders majāz ‘trope’ and thus assumes for Abū ‘Ubaida the antithesis majāz–ḥaqīqa.
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7 e.g., I, 1, 1. 13, and curiously 1. 20: majāz tafsīr, clearly synonymous with majāz (as in II. 3–7, 11–12). Tafsīr itself was in all likelihood not yet an exegetical terminus technicus, see BSOAS, xxxi, 3, 1968, 470, 473 ffGoogle Scholar.
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![](https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20160401093106478-0434:S0041977X00103325_eqnU16.gif?pub-status=live)
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