الوحدة البنائية للقرآن الكريم وأثرها في الاستنباط: رؤية أصولية

The Structural Unity of the Glorious Qurʾan and its Impact on Deductive-Exegesis: A Perspective Based on the Uṣūlī Paradigm

Abstract

The Glorious Qurʾan and the Sunnah of the Prophet are regarded as the supreme reference for the nation of Prophet Muhammad PBUH for all of them contained of doctrines, laws, and morality. Therefore, understanding and reflecting on the laws therein is the most important factor for the growth and revival of Islamic thought throughout history. In this paper, we utilized one of the exceptional features of the glorious book, namely structural uniformity, as a principle of jurisprudence methodology propagated by Tāhā Jābir al-Alwāni, who was interested in several Qurʾanic issues, including abrogation, structural uniformity, Qurʾanic epistemological methodology and the role of the Qurʾan in contemporary humanity. The problem of this research is concerned with Tāhā Alwāni’s views on the structural uniformity of the noble Qurʾan and its impact in addressing the specific vision of revelation and developing the holistic vision in Islamic thought in general, and jurisprudential deduction thus, addressing the shortcomings of the inferential perception in dealing with the Sharīʿah texts (the Qurʾan and Sunnah) especially in terms of accepting the laws, rather than initiating them. This clarifies most of the problems of Qurʾanic text deduction among other schools of thought. Using the descriptive and analytical approach, the research presents Tāhā Alwāni’s views regarding structural uniformity of the Qurʾan starting from its definition, importance, and its role in deducing rulings through the extrapolation and analysis of the opinions of classical and modern scholars. The key findings revealed that ‘structural unity’ is a new terminology that was long known as ‘al-naẓm’, which the rhetoricians (balāgiyyūn) considered as an independent theory that embroiled the philosophy of the challenge directed at the jinn and the mankind to produce the similitude of the Glorious Qurʾan. Whosoever reviews the ideas of al-Rāzī, Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Jurjānī, ʿAbd al-Qāhir and Ibn Hishām the Grammarian, would discover this fact. Moreover, Tāhā Jābir al-Alwāni’s views on structural unity as a methodology of deducing rulings from the Noble Qurʾan, is not only part of the knowledge of the fundamentals of jurisprudence. Rather it is part other Islamic sciences, and knowledge, of which the Qurʾan is considered the basis of its origin and development such as exegesis, jurisprudence, ḥadīth, and tawḥīd, along with the principles of jurisprudence, that is our subject matter.