Exegesis and Hermeneutics

Meaning, Authority, and Understanding in Islamic and Comparative Thought

The distinction between exegesis and hermeneutics is useful only when it does more than supply two labels for interpretation. Exegesis explains a particular text; hermeneutics examines the conditions, procedures, and claims to authority involved in that explanation. Yet neither activity can be isolated from the other. A commentary already embodies judgments about language, evidence, authorship, and the reader. A theory of interpretation becomes intellectually responsible when it can account for the actual difficulties encountered in reading.

This relationship is especially consequential in the study of revelation. A disagreement over a Qurʾānic expression may concern its grammar, the reliability of a transmitted report, the nature of divine speech, or the authority of spiritual knowledge. These are different kinds of disagreement. They cannot be settled by placing all interpretations on a single scale from “literal” to “symbolic,” or from “traditional” to “modern.”

Islamic interpretation offers a rich, internally differentiated account of understanding, distributed across Qurʾānic commentary, legal theory, theology, rhetoric, and spiritual practice. Comparison with Christian scholasticism and modern philosophical hermeneutics makes that account more intelligible when it preserves differences in first principles. The central question is not simply how many meanings a text can bear, but what warrants a particular claim about meaning, and how far that claim extends.

1. What exegesis and hermeneutics distinguish

Exegesis, from Greek exēgēsis, is explanation or exposition. Its characteristic questions are concrete: What does this word denote here? What is the antecedent of this pronoun? Does the command establish an obligation? How does this sentence relate to the surrounding discourse? An exegetical judgment may be a one-word gloss, a grammatical analysis, or a sustained argument extending over many pages.

Hermeneutics, associated with Greek hermēneuein, concerns interpretation and how meaning is made intelligible. In its methodological form, it asks how interpretations should be established and evaluated. In its philosophical form, it asks what understanding itself involves: whether readers can escape their historical situation, how prior understanding shapes inquiry, and how a text can address circumstances beyond those of its first reception. Aristotle’s Peri hermēneias, conventionally translated On Interpretation, treats significant speech and assertion; despite its title, it is not a treatise on modern textual hermeneutics.[1]

Calling exegesis “first-order” and hermeneutics “second-order” is therefore a useful analytical distinction, not an impermeable division between genres. Commentators regularly explain their own methods, challenge a rival’s rules of inference, and reconsider a general principle because a particular passage resists it. Conversely, hermeneutical theories depend on examples that reveal what their principles permit.

Three further distinctions help clarify the discussion. Meaning concerns what an utterance communicates; reference concerns what it speaks about; application concerns what follows when it is brought to bear on a situation. A text may retain a recognizable meaning while receiving new applications. It may also communicate through figurative language without lacking a determinate reference. Disputes become confused when an application is presented as a lexical definition, or a spiritual association as the sole intention of a verse.

Eisegesis names the imposition of a meaning for which the text provides insufficient warrant. It is not simply the presence of prior commitments: all reading begins with some expectations. The failure occurs when those expectations are insulated from correction, allowing the text only to confirm what the interpreter already wishes to establish.

2. Why the Arabic terms do not form a simple equivalent pair

Tafsīr (تَفْسِير) and taʾwīl (تَأْوِيل) belong to overlapping histories of interpretation. Translating the former as exegesis and the latter as hermeneutics may sometimes be convenient, but treating these translations as a stable correspondence is misleading. Both Arabic terms have referred to acts of interpretation and the works that result from them. Neither invariably denotes a theory about interpretation.

The root f-s-r conveys explanation or disclosure. The Qurʾān itself uses tafsīr at Q 25:33, in the sense of explanation. The root a-w-l, associated with returning and an eventual outcome, helps explain some uses of taʾwīl, but etymology cannot decide every later technical meaning. At Q 12:100, Joseph identifies the fulfillment of his earlier dream as its taʾwīl. At Q 18:78–82, the term introduces an explanation of actions whose rationale Moses had not understood. At Q 7:53, it concerns the realization of what revelation announces. Interpretation, intelligible explanation, and eventual realization are related here without being identical.[2]

Al-Ṭabarī’s Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān illustrates the broad exegetical use of taʾwīl. His commentary assembles reports, investigates Arabic usage, weighs alternatives, and often identifies a preferred explanation. The title itself shows why we cannot make taʾwīl synonymous with esotericism or figurative reinterpretation.[3]

The changing vocabulary also warns against anachronism. A word that denotes general explanation in one author may designate the interpretation of an apparent meaning in another, and the spiritual disclosure of an inward significance in a third. We must establish which usage an author intends before deciding whether two authors agree or disagree.

3. Interpretation and the limits of certainty

The introduction transmitted with al-Māturīdī’s Taʾwīlāt ahl al-sunna offers a valuable distinction. It associates tafsīr with a decisive claim about what God intended and taʾwīl with articulating meanings that the wording can admit, without claiming to have identified the divine intention exclusively. Its often-cited contrast between the Companions and later jurists rests on differences of access and warrant. The deeper issue is epistemic responsibility: what entitles an interpreter to speak with certainty?[4]

This distinction goes beyond saying that taʾwīl means choosing the most likely interpretation. Tarjīḥ (تَرْجِيح), the weighing or preference of competing possibilities, may be part of the process. But admissibility, preference, and certainty are distinct judgments. “This expression can bear this meaning,” “this is the stronger reading,” and “God certainly intended this alone” do not say the same thing.

Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī records another influential differentiation: tafsīr has a wider scope, often concerning individual expressions, while taʾwīl more often concerns meanings and occurs especially in relation to revealed books. This is a scholarly account of usage, not a definition accepted uniformly across all periods and schools.[5]

The distinction between qaṭʿī (قَطْعِيّ), decisive, and ẓannī (ظَنِّيّ), probabilistic, sharpens the issue. In legal and theological reasoning, the establishment of a source and the determination of its meaning are separate questions. Thubūt concerns whether a text or report is established; dalāla concerns what it signifies. A scriptural passage accepted as authoritative may still allow more than one interpretation. Conversely, an unambiguous sentence in a weakly transmitted report does not become an authoritative proof merely because its wording is clear.

Probabilistic reasoning is not equivalent to arbitrary opinion. Ijtihād (اِجْتِهَاد) is disciplined exertion toward a judgment where the relevant conditions permit it. Tawaqquf (تَوَقُّف), withholding judgment, is also a considered scholarly response when the available evidence does not justify a conclusion. A mature interpretive practice must have room for both.

4. Ambiguity, divine attributes, and the dispute over taʾwīl

Q 3:7 distinguishes muḥkamāt (مُحْكَمَات), verses described as the foundation of the Book, from mutashābihāt (مُتَشَابِهَات). The exact scope of these categories is itself debated. The verse also raises the question of who knows the taʾwīl of the latter: God alone, or God and those firmly established in knowledge, al-rāsikhūn fī al-ʿilm (الرَّاسِخُونَ فِي الْعِلْمِ).[2]

The difference involves syntax, the function of the conjunction wa-, and waqf wa-ibtidāʾ (وَقْف وَابْتِدَاء), the disciplines of pausing and resuming recitation. This theological history cannot be reduced to the placement of a modern comma. Nor do the alternatives always generate two wholly opposed positions. Ibn Kathīr explains that if taʾwīl means ultimate reality or fulfillment, knowledge may be reserved to God; if it means intelligible explanation, those grounded in knowledge can possess it. An apparent contradiction may depend in part on the sense assigned to the disputed term.[6]

In theological argument, taʾwīl often acquires the more specific sense of understanding an expression to mean something other than what it immediately appears to mean, on the basis of supporting evidence. Here ẓāhir (ظَاهِر), apparent meaning, must be distinguished from a crude physical reading. Context, Arabic idiom, and prior commitments concerning God can all affect what an author regards as apparent.

The governing theological terms include tanzīh (تَنْزِيه), affirming divine incomparability; tashbīh (تَشْبِيه), assimilation to created things; ithbāt (إِثْبَات), affirmation of attributes; and taʿṭīl (تَعْطِيل), their alleged negation or evacuation. These terms also appear in polemic. To report that one writer accuses another of taʿṭīl is different from adopting that accusation as a neutral description.

A rigid opposition between an Ashʿarī who interprets God’s “hand” as power and a Ḥanbalī who refuses interpretation does not hold when we examine individual authors. Al-Nawawī discusses both interpretive restraint accompanied by transcendence and appropriately warranted reinterpretation. The Ḥanbalī Ibn al-Jawzī criticizes corporeal understandings and discusses noncorporeal senses of scriptural language.[7][8]

Similarly, bi-lā kayf (بِلَا كَيْفَ), without specifying how, does not by itself settle every question about meaning. Entrusting knowledge of modality to God and entrusting the intended meaning to God are distinguishable positions, although later descriptions of tafwīḍ (تَفْوِيض) sometimes blur them. We therefore need to examine an author’s argument about a particular expression; a school label cannot provide a complete explanation.

5. The linguistic disciplines of understanding

Islamic hermeneutical reflection is distributed across several disciplines. ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān (عُلُومُ الْقُرْآنِ), the Qurʾānic sciences, examines such matters as revelation, recitation, textual arrangement, and interpretive procedure. Works associated with uṣūl al-tafsīr (أُصُولُ التَّفْسِيرِ) address the principles and qualifications of exegesis. Al-Zarkashī’s al-Burhān and al-Suyūṭī’s al-Itqān preserve broad discussions; Ibn Taymiyya’s Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr presents an influential account with its own doctrinal and historical location. No single work should be treated as the voice of all Islamic interpretation.[9]

The philological foundation includes lugha, lexical usage; ṣarf, morphology; naḥw, syntax; and iʿrāb, the analysis of grammatical relationships and inflection. An interpreter must establish both what a root can mean and which meaning a particular form, construction, and context support. The same root does not guarantee the same sense, and the presence of a word elsewhere in scripture does not establish its meaning in the passage under discussion.

Balāgha (بَلَاغَة), rhetoric, extends this inquiry to how discourse communicates through its arrangement. Taqdīm wa-taʾkhīr, foregrounding and ordering; ḥadhf, ellipsis; iltifāt, shifts of grammatical person or mode of address; and qaṣr, restriction or exclusivity, can alter the force of an utterance without changing the dictionary meanings of its words.

ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s theory of naẓm (نَظْم), developed in Dalāʾil al-iʿjāz, clarifies this point. Eloquence is not a property of isolated words subsequently assembled into a sentence. It arises through meaningful relations organized by grammar. Interpretation therefore considers structured discourse, asking why these relationships appear in this order and serve this communicative purpose. Al-Jurjānī’s account can be productively compared with modern semantics and pragmatics, provided the comparison does not recast him as an early version of a later European theorist.[10]

Siyāq (سِيَاق), context or the course of discourse, includes the immediate sentence and the wider passage. Munāsaba (مُنَاسَبَة) concerns relationships between verses or units of discourse. These concepts overlap with grammatical coherence, rhetorical organization, historical setting, and theological unity, while preserving the distinctions among them. Each requires its own evidence.

6. Legal theory as a discipline of warranted inference

Uṣūl al-fiqh (أُصُولُ الْفِقْهِ) develops a detailed account of how authoritative language generates judgments. Al-Shāfiʿī’s al-Risāla makes bayān (بَيَان), clarification or exposition, central to the relationship among revelation, prophetic explanation, and legal knowledge. Later works such as al-Juwaynī’s al-Burhān, al-Sarakhsī’s Uṣūl, and al-Ghazālī’s al-Mustaṣfā develop distinct approaches to linguistic indication, evidence, and inference.[11]

Al-Ghazālī states the demands of warranted interpretation precisely in al-Mustaṣfā. A less immediately apparent interpretation requires evidence sufficient to outweigh the meaning initially suggested by the wording. The more remote the proposed interpretation, the stronger its supporting evidence must be. Such evidence may include a qarīna (قَرِينَة), a contextual or evidentiary indicator, another textual statement, or an argument whose force the interpreter must demonstrate. Interpretation therefore requires assessing probability and the burden of evidence, beyond identifying another conceivable meaning.[11]

The following technical distinctions are useful beyond law, but they should retain their precise meanings.

Terms	Interpretive question
ʿĀmm and khāṣṣ عَامّ وَخَاصّ ʿāmm wa-khāṣṣ	Does an expression concern a whole class or a specified referent or set, and what evidence can delimit its scope?
Muṭlaq and muqayyad مُطْلَق وَمُقَيَّد muṭlaq wa-muqayyad	Is a term unqualified, or subject to an expressed qualification?
Amr and nahy أَمْر وَنَهْي ʾamr wa-nahy	What force does a command or prohibition have in this context?
Manṭūq and mafhūm مَنْطُوق وَمَفْهُوم manṭūq wa-mafhūm	What is indicated by the expressed wording, and what is inferred beyond what is expressly stated?
Mujmal and mubayyan مُجْمَل وَمُبَيَّن mujmal wa-mubayyan	What remains insufficiently specified, and what evidence supplies clarification?
Ḥaqīqa and majāz حَقِيقَة وَمَجَاز ḥaqīqa wa-majāz	Does an expression carry its established linguistic, legal, or customary meaning, or a transferred meaning supported by contextual evidence?
Naskh and takhṣīṣ نَسْخ وَتَخْصِيص naskh wa-takhṣīṣ	Is an earlier ruling superseded, or is the scope of a general expression specified?

These categories are not a single uniform code. Jurists differ over the evidentiary force of mafhūm al-mukhālafa, an inference from a stated qualification to the contrary case. Ḥanafī accounts distinguish ʿibārat al-naṣṣ, ishārat al-naṣṣ, dalālat al-naṣṣ, and iqtiḍāʾ al-naṣṣ, different ways in which wording indicates a judgment. Here ishāra is a technical mode of legal indication, distinct from a Sufi spiritual allusion. Shared terminology across disciplines does not establish that the same inference is being made.[12]

Asbāb al-nuzūl (أَسْبَابُ النُّزُولِ), reports concerning occasions of revelation, contribute historical evidence. Their value depends on their transmission and on what the report actually establishes. An occasion can clarify a reference or problem without necessarily exhausting the scope of the wording. The widely invoked principle al-ʿibra bi-ʿumūm al-lafẓ lā bi-khuṣūṣ al-sabab holds that consideration attaches to the wording’s generality rather than merely to the occasion’s particularity. Applying it still requires judgment about what the wording encompasses and whether other evidence qualifies its scope.[13]

These questions of interpretation also concern maqāṣid al-sharīʿa (مَقَاصِدُ الشَّرِيعَةِ), the purposes of the law. In al-Shāṭibī’s al-Muwāfaqāt, purposes are connected to sustained study of the law’s materials and patterns. They are not simply preferred ethical slogans placed above inconvenient passages. A purposes-based reading must explain how it establishes a purpose, how that purpose relates to particular evidence, and what authorizes its proposed application.[14]

7. Commentary genres and the organization of knowledge

The familiar distinction between tafsīr bi-l-maʾthūr, commentary through transmitted materials, and tafsīr bi-l-raʾy, commentary through judgment, is useful as a distinction of emphasis. It becomes misleading when it separates transmission from reasoning as if either could operate alone. Selecting reports, evaluating them, reconciling apparent conflicts, and deciding their relevance already involve judgment. Al-Ṭabarī is an obvious example: the preservation of reports and the weighing of interpretations belong to the same scholarly enterprise.[3]

The warnings against speaking about the Qurʾān by opinion also require precision. Al-Tirmidhī transmits reports on speech without knowledge and on interpretation by personal opinion in nos. 2950–2952. Their wording and assessments of transmission differ, as do later gradings. They should not be collapsed into one uncontested formula prohibiting all reasoned interpretation. The concern with unwarranted speech must be understood alongside the distinction between disciplined inquiry and the imposition of an unsupported conclusion.[15]

Commentaries can also be described by their dominant questions. Al-Zamakhsharī’s al-Kashshāf combines rhetorical analysis with Muʿtazilī theological commitments; al-Qurṭubī gives sustained attention to legal questions; al-Rāzī’s Mafātīḥ al-ghayb brings theology, philosophy, and other sciences into exegetical discussion. These descriptions identify emphases within composite works. They do not place each commentator in an isolated discipline.

Scale is a separate matter. Mukhtaṣar denotes an abridged work; wajīz, a concise one; wasīṭ, an intermediate one; and basīṭ or mabsūṭ, an extended treatment. Al-Wāḥidī’s al-Wajīz, al-Wasīṭ, and al-Basīṭ demonstrate deliberate differences of scope. Yet these works should not be presented as identical interpretations reproduced in three sizes. His approach and purposes must be investigated in each work. The introduction to al-Basīṭ makes unusually explicit the training in language and recitation that he regards as necessary for understanding.[16]

Other terms concern textual relationships rather than length. A matn is a base text; a sharḥ explains it; a ḥāshiya supplies marginal or further commentary, often upon a commentary; and taqrīrāt can record further analytical or teaching notes. These forms are not a universal four-stage ladder. They belong to a flexible scholarly practice in which later readers correct, qualify, and reconstruct inherited arguments.

The gloss traditions surrounding al-Kashshāf and al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl show why brevity need not imply simplicity or passivity. A short formulation can compress a long controversy; a gloss can reopen the reasoning concealed by that compression. Al-Bayḍāwī’s relationship to al-Zamakhsharī includes selection and theological reworking, and the later reception of the two works has its own institutional history.[17][18]

The length of a commentary therefore provides insufficient evidence for its theology. A concise gloss may serve teaching or rapid consultation. A long commentary may document alternatives, defend a position, or preserve a debate. We should not infer that the first necessarily distrusts interpretive expansion, or that the second necessarily subscribes to an unrestricted infinity of meanings.

8. Spiritual interpretation and the authority of the inward sense

Ishārī interpretation works through ishāra (إِشَارَة), an allusion or indication that discloses spiritual significance. Commentaries associated with Sahl al-Tustarī, al-Sulamī, and al-Qushayrī locate understanding within the transformation of the reader. The relevant vocabulary includes tazkiya, purification; adab, disciplined comportment; dhawq, experiential tasting; maʿrifa, spiritual knowing; and kashf, unveiling. These terms identify different aspects of a spiritual epistemology and should not be treated as interchangeable names for intuition.[19]

Central to this discussion is the relation between ẓāhir, the outward or apparent sense, and bāṭin, the inward sense. Many defenders of Sufi commentary argue that spiritual understanding should coexist with the outward sense and the obligations of revelation. This influential criterion of legitimacy does not establish that every Sufi author formulated the same rules. Nor is bāṭinī a neutral technical synonym for an invalid reading: the word has a history of polemical use, especially in disputes involving Ismāʿīlīs.

A saying attributed to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq distinguishes ʿibāra, expression; ishāra, allusion; laṭāʾif, subtleties; and ḥaqāʾiq, realities, associating them with different recipients. It is more accurately described as a saying transmitted under his name in the Sufi exegetical tradition than as a securely established statement by him. Its attribution and transmission require scrutiny, and its appearance in al-Sulamī does not mean that the commentary consistently applies a fourfold scheme to every verse.[20]

The decisive hermeneutical issue is the status of an insight. An inward reading may be offered as a spiritually illuminating correspondence, a meaning received in contemplation, a theological explanation of reality, or an interpretation binding upon a community. These are different claims to authority. Evaluating them requires attention both to their connection with the text and to the epistemic status assigned to the interpreter’s experience.

Ismāʿīlī accounts of tanzīl (تَنْزِيل) and taʾwīl place this question within a particular doctrine of prophetic revelation and the Imām’s interpretive authority. Works such as al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān’s Asās al-taʾwīl and Taʾwīl al-daʿāʾim, and Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s Wajh-i dīn, relate outward formulations and practices to inward significance. This cannot be reduced to private mystical ingenuity. The authorization of interpretation is itself part of the tradition’s theology; its positions should not be generalized to every Shīʿī community.[21]

9. Ibn ʿArabī and al-Qūnawī on divine speech and understanding

The Akbarian tradition introduces a more explicitly ontological question: how does the structure of reality bear on the meanings of revelation? Ontological here concerns being and manifestation; epistemological concerns the conditions of knowing. For Ibn ʿArabī, the two cannot be cleanly separated, because the knowing subject is itself situated within divine self-disclosure, tajallī (تَجَلِّي).

Ibn ʿArabī’s account of Qurʾānic plurality is grounded in a theology of divine speech. As William Chittick explains through passages of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, Ibn ʿArabī holds that the meanings supported by the Arabic of revelation can be intended by the divine Speaker, whose knowledge is not restricted like that of a human author. The thesis is specifically Akbarian; it should not be presented as Muslim consensus. Its expansiveness is joined to a linguistic constraint: the interpreter cannot simply attach any desired proposition to a verse. Ibn ʿArabī also distinguishes an understanding received by a reader from what that reader can require others to accept.[22]

In this account, the hearer’s istiʿdād (اِسْتِعْدَاد), receptivity or preparedness, matters to understanding. What is disclosed in an encounter with revelation depends on the recipient’s capacity, without the divine address being reduced to that capacity. The heart, qalb, has a distinctive role because it can receive changing disclosures; reason, ʿaql, and imagination, khayāl, contribute different modes of apprehension. These technical claims belong to Ibn ʿArabī’s understanding of knowledge and cannot be reduced to loose appeals to emotional sincerity.[23]

Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s Iʿjāz al-bayān fī taʾwīl Umm al-Qurʾān develops interpretation through a sustained reading of al-Fātiḥa. The correct title matters: iʿjāz (إِعْجَاز), inimitability or the rendering of others incapable of matching something, differs from ījāz (إِيجَاز), concision. The work examines the relationship among divine speech, knowledge, and the comprehensive significance of the opening sūra.[24]

In passages of the Iʿjāz al-bayān, al-Qūnawī argues that perception is restricted by the partial attributes that dominate the knower. He describes the human being as a barzakh (بَرْزَخ), an isthmus between divine and created presences, capable of comprehending both without erasing their distinction. The movement toward iʿtidāl (اِعْتِدَال), equilibrium, loosens the hold of one-sided attachments and enlarges the capacity to know. These passages permit a more precise hermeneutical inference: spiritual formation affects what the reader can receive, so knowledge of revelation cannot be separated from the condition of the recipient.[24]

A useful comparison can be made with philosophical hermeneutics: both Akbarian interpretation and Gadamer’s account challenge the fantasy of a reader wholly detached from the act of understanding. The difference between them is equally substantial. Historically effected understanding is not the same claim as kashf, and a fusion of horizons is not a translation of tajallī. One concerns the historical conditions of understanding; the other, within this tradition, concerns disclosure grounded in the divine ordering of reality.

Source attribution is indispensable here. The commentary commonly printed as Tafsīr Ibn ʿArabī is identified by modern scholarship as the work of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī. It belongs to the wider Akbarian intellectual inheritance, but its formulations should not be quoted as Ibn ʿArabī’s own without further evidence.[25]

10. Christian scholasticism and the plurality of scriptural senses

Comparison becomes more rigorous when it examines how a tradition justifies multiple senses. Augustine’s De doctrina christiana links interpretation to the distinction between things and signs and to the formation of a reader directed toward love of God and neighbor. Yet this ethical orientation does not make a charitable interpretation automatically correct. Augustine distinguishes the benefit of a reading that promotes charity from the further task of understanding what the author meant; a mistaken route still needs correction.[26]

Thomas Aquinas supplies a particularly precise scholastic account in Summa theologiae I, question 1, article 10. In ordinary language, words signify things. In scripture, because God is understood to govern both language and events, the things signified can themselves signify further things. On this basis Aquinas distinguishes the literal or historical sense, sensus litteralis or historicus, from spiritual senses: the allegorical, concerning fulfillment in Christ; the moral or tropological, concerning action; and the anagogical, concerning final fulfillment.[27]

Aquinas thus grounds plurality in a theological account of signs and providence. Comparison with Islamic accounts must keep in view the specifically Christian relation among Christ, salvation history, and spiritual signification.

Aquinas also explicitly places metaphor within the literal sense when metaphor communicates the intended meaning. Accordingly, his “literal” does not mean “every expression denotes a physical object directly.” The distinction between literal and spiritual senses is not equivalent to the Arabic distinction between ḥaqīqa and majāz. Nor does it precisely reproduce ẓāhir and bāṭin.[27]

The medieval fourfold scheme, often called the quadriga, thus invites comparison with the fourfold saying attributed to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, although the two classify different things. The former differentiates kinds of scriptural signification; the latter differentiates modes of apprehension associated with recipients. Numerical resemblance does not establish historical dependence or conceptual identity.

11. From methods of reading to philosophical hermeneutics

Friedrich Schleiermacher broadened hermeneutical reflection into a general account of understanding discourse. His grammatical interpretation relates an utterance to language; his psychological or technical interpretation relates it to the individual act of composition. The aim is to coordinate these dimensions rather than choose between grammar and an author’s private mind. Misunderstanding requires active prevention, even when familiarity makes a text appear self-evident.[28]

Wilhelm Dilthey connected interpretation to the Geisteswissenschaften, the human sciences, through the relationship among lived experience, its expressions, and understanding. Verstehen, understanding, and Erklären, explanation, frame a problem concerning how human life becomes knowable. They should not be turned into a simple prohibition against causal explanation in history or social inquiry.[29]

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, especially §§31–32, relocates understanding within human existence. Interpretation articulates an understanding that is already operative. Its fore-structure includes Vorhabe, what is held in advance; Vorsicht, the perspective guiding inquiry; and Vorgriff, its anticipatory conceptual grasp. The hermeneutical circle is therefore not merely a reading technique in which the parts illuminate the whole and the whole illuminates the parts; it also concerns how inquiry begins within an understanding it must subsequently test and revise.[30]

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method develops Wirkungsgeschichte, effective history, and wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, consciousness of being affected by history. We encounter texts through language, questions, and inherited practices that we did not create. Vorurteil, prejudgment, names anticipations that may enable understanding or obstruct it. Their inevitability does not make them immune to criticism. The fusion of horizons, Horizontverschmelzung, describes an encounter in which understanding changes through engagement with the text’s subject matter; it does not authorize the reader to absorb the past into present preferences.[31]

Gadamer also treats application, Anwendung, as internal to understanding: discerning what a text says cannot be entirely separated from discerning what it asks of a present situation. His engagement with Aristotle’s phronēsis, practical wisdom, connects interpretation with judgment that cannot be reduced to applying a rule mechanically. This invites comparison with juridical reasoning without making phronēsis and ijtihād equivalent concepts.[31]

Paul Ricoeur emphasizes distanciation: written discourse gains a degree of independence from its original situation and can address new readers. Interpretation moves through explanatory work toward an appropriation of the possibilities the text discloses. His better-known discussion of suspicion concerns the exposure of concealed interests and illusions, but it does not exhaust his project. Appropriation can involve allowing the text to question and enlarge the reader’s self-understanding.[32]

E. D. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation distinguishes a work’s determinate verbal meaning from its significance in relation to later circumstances. This distinction seeks to preserve criteria for interpretive validity while recognizing that relevance changes. Emilio Betti also defends the autonomy of the object of interpretation and a disciplined method, but his theory should not simply be folded into Hirsch’s terminology. Their respective disagreements with philosophical hermeneutics concern how interpretive accountability can be maintained.[33]

Reader-response approaches bring further differences into view. Wolfgang Iser examines how readers actualize textual possibilities and respond to gaps; Stanley Fish emphasizes the interpretive communities that shape what readers recognize as evidence and meaning. These approaches neither constitute one doctrine nor form the endpoint of a single historical progression from author to reader. They represent continuing disagreements about the relation among textual constraint, interpretive activity, and social formation.[34]

12. Modern Qurʾānic hermeneutics and the problem of application

Modern Muslim discussions do not begin with the discovery that scripture requires interpretation. They reconsider inherited procedures under changed historical, institutional, and intellectual conditions. New questions concern literary unity, colonial and postcolonial society, gender, ethical generalization, and the relationship between revelation and historically situated discourse.

Fazlur Rahman’s Islam and Modernity formulates a double movement: from a present problem back to the circumstances and moral significance of Qurʾānic responses, and from the resulting general understanding toward a considered response in the present. Its central difficulty is methodological: how does the interpreter establish that a principle is grounded in the text and determine what fidelity to it requires under changed conditions? The procedure requires justification; an appeal to relevance cannot replace it.[35]

Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd’s later work emphasizes the Qurʾān as living discourse as well as written text, drawing attention to address, dialogue, recitation, and reception. Amina Wadud’s Qurʾan and Woman interrogates the effects of gendered assumptions through attention to language, context, and the Qurʾān considered as a whole. These projects differ in their premises and conclusions, and both have generated substantial disagreement. Both explicitly address the interpretive role of the questions and social locations that readers bring to scripture.[36][37]

Thematic exegesis, tafsīr mawḍūʿī, organizes inquiry around a subject or a sūra’s thematic unity; it need not share one theological outlook. Similarly, attempts to relate scripture to natural science range from reflecting on creation to claiming precise anticipation of later discoveries. The hermeneutical question is whether the proposed scientific identification is supported by the Arabic and context, or whether it retrospectively narrows a verse to a theory the words do not establish.

Assessing a modern reading therefore requires more than asking whether it is new. The assessment must examine the reading’s textual evidence, its account of continuity, its treatment of counterevidence, and the authority it claims for moving from meaning to present application.

13. Al-Fātiḥa as a worked example

Consider Q 1:5:

إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ

Iyyāka naʿbudu wa-iyyāka nastaʿīn.

“You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help.”

Sūrat al-Fātiḥa 1:5

At the grammatical level, iyyāka is a detached object pronoun placed before the verb. Naʿbudu and nastaʿīn are first-person plural verbs: the speaker says “we.” A concise gloss can identify these forms and clarify the verbs. This is exegesis in its most immediate sense.

At the rhetorical level, the foregrounding of the object supports the force of exclusive devotion, conventionally expressed in English by “alone.” The repeated pronoun contributes to the parallel construction. Al-Jalālayn explicitly explains the verse in terms of reserving worship for God and seeking divine assistance. Its brevity does not make the interpretation theory-free: it has already judged what the construction communicates.[38]

At the level of discourse, the verse follows praise of God in the third person and turns to direct address. The shift can be analyzed as iltifāt. The sequence moves from speaking about God toward speaking to God. That is a textual observation; an account of its spiritual significance is a further interpretive step and should be identified as such.

The verse also stands within an established practice of recitation. In the ḥadīth qudsī recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 395a, al-Fātiḥa is presented as an exchange between God and the worshiper, with the verse on worship and assistance marking their relation. The interpretation therefore concerns an utterance enacted in prayer, not merely a sentence observed on a page. This provides a grounded connection to what modern philosophy calls the performative dimension of language: words can constitute an act of petition, commitment, or address.[39]

A theological reading then asks what dependence on God implies about agency. The verse declares worship and requests assistance in the same movement. It does not, by its wording alone, supply a complete theory of divine and human causality. Deriving such a theory requires further scriptural evidence and argument. A spiritual reading may reflect on how the request for assistance corrects self-sufficiency, or how the plural challenges an exclusively private understanding of devotion. These are intelligible developments from the verse, but they should not be presented as dictionary meanings of its individual words.

The preceding verse, Q 1:4, provides another kind of plurality. The canonical recitations include mālik, owner or master, and malik, king. This is transmitted variation, qirāʾāt, rather than a modern interpreter’s substitution. A responsible account distinguishes the evidence establishing a recitation from the implications drawn from it. The related senses can illuminate divine authority without erasing their lexical difference.[40]

An Akbarian commentary may further understand al-Fātiḥa as a comprehensive articulation of the relation between the divine and the human.[41] Assessing that claim requires examining the commentary’s account of comprehensiveness and correspondence. Grammatical parsing alone will not establish its metaphysics; conversely, metaphysical interest does not remove the obligation to attend to the wording.

This example shows why different kinds of interpretive disagreement must be distinguished. Two readings may be compatible because they answer different questions. Others may contradict one another because they make incompatible assertions at the same level. The scholar’s task is to identify the kind of claim before judging its truth or legitimacy.

14. Translation, reflection, and interpretive responsibility

Translation is an interpretive act because languages distribute meanings differently. A translator must decide among possible senses, negotiate syntax, and determine whether an implication should remain implicit. Translating taʾwīl as “interpretation” throughout the Qurʾān would obscure instances where realization or fulfillment is central. Translating ẓāhir uniformly as “literal” can import assumptions that the author did not hold.

Yet translation need not eliminate every ambiguity. A translator can preserve an open construction, supply alternatives in a note, or explain why a term remains untranslated. The familiar description “translation of the meanings of the Qurʾān” marks both an interpretive mediation and a theological distinction between the Arabic revelation and its rendering. It does not certify any one translation as exhaustive.

The same care applies to tadabbur (تَدَبُّر), reflective consideration, and istinbāṭ (اِسْتِنْبَاط), the drawing out of an implication. Q 38:29 connects revelation with reflection on its verses. Reflection can be spiritually and ethically serious without claiming the authority of a technical commentary. The distinction protects the value of personal engagement while preventing an individual response from silently becoming an assertion about what the text must mean for everyone.[2]

Disciplined interpretation therefore makes its own operations visible. It distinguishes the established wording from a proposed reading, an admissible reading from a preferred one, a preferred reading from a certain conclusion, and a personal appropriation from a binding judgment. It examines a commentator’s evidence as carefully as the commentator’s conclusions. It also recognizes that inherited classifications are themselves historical objects requiring examination.

This has substantial consequences for education. Readers should learn not only what al-Ṭabarī, al-Rāzī, al-Qushayrī, or al-Qūnawī says, but what kind of question each is answering and what makes the answer persuasive within that work. Comparative study then becomes a means of clarifying assumptions rather than accumulating resemblances. Exegesis supplies particular judgments about texts; hermeneutical reflection makes those judgments answerable for their evidence, premises, and reach. Bringing them together responsibly preserves both the possibility of deeper understanding and the obligation to distinguish understanding from invention.

Notes and references

References identify the relevant works and passages; pagination follows the edition specified. Links lead to primary texts, translations, or the scholarly discussions used here. Comparative judgments and the worked example’s further implications are the article’s own analysis.

1. Aristotle, On Interpretation, chapters 1–4, especially 16a3–8 and 17a1–7, translated by E. M. Edghill. Primary text.
2. The Qurʾān: 25:33, 12:100, 18:78–82, 7:53, 3:7, and 38:29. References use the standard sūra and verse numbering; translations of isolated terms in the article are contextual glosses.
3. Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān. For a concrete example of reports, linguistic analysis, and evaluative argument, see the commentary on Q 1:1.
4. Al-Māturīdī (2005), Taʾwīlāt ahl al-sunna, ed. Majdī Bāsallūm. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, vol. 1, p. 349, author’s introduction. Arabic text.
5. Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī (1999), Tafsīr al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Basyūnī. Tanta University, vol. 1, pp. 11–12, discussion of tafsīr and taʾwīl. Arabic text.
6. Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, commentary on Q 3:7. Accessible English translation.
7. Al-Nawawī, al-Minhāj fī sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, commentary on Muslim 758, discussion of divine descent and interpretive approaches. Arabic commentary.
8. Ibn al-Jawzī, Dafʿ shubah al-tashbīh, ed. Ḥasan al-Saqqāf, pp. 114–115, discussion of yad. Arabic text.
9. Al-Zarkashī (1957), al-Burhān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān, ed. Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm. Cairo: ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 4 vols. See especially types 1–2, 22–24, and 34–43. Text and contents. Related major works are al-Suyūṭī’s al-Itqān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān and Ibn Taymiyya’s Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr.
10. ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Dalāʾil al-iʿjāz, section on naẓm and grammar, especially numbered paragraphs 75–76. Arabic text.
11. Al-Shāfiʿī, al-Risāla, “Bāb kayfa al-bayān.” Arabic transcription. Al-Ghazālī, al-Mustaṣfā, third pole, first art, section on al-ẓāhir wa-l-muʾawwal, pp. 196–197 in the displayed edition. Arabic text.
12. Muḥammad Adīb Ṣāliḥ (2008), Tafsīr al-nuṣūṣ fī al-fiqh al-Islāmī, 5th ed. Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islāmī, 2 vols. See the comparative treatment of the Ḥanafī modes of indication and the methods of the mutakallimūn. Contents and edition; discussion of ʿibārat al-naṣṣ. A principal classical source is al-Sarakhsī’s Uṣūl.
13. Al-Zarkashī, al-Burhān, type 1, on occasions of revelation and the relationship between the occasion and the wording’s scope. Arabic text.
14. Al-Shāṭibī, al-Muwāfaqāt, Book of Purposes. For a sustained account of induction in his method, see Aḥmad al-Raysūnī (1992), Naẓariyyat al-maqāṣid ʿinda al-Imām al-Shāṭibī, 2nd ed. Riyadh: al-Dār al-ʿĀlamiyya li-l-Kitāb al-Islāmī, discussion of istiqrāʾ, p. 284. Arabic discussion.
15. Al-Tirmidhī, al-Jāmiʿ, nos. 2950, 2951, and 2952. Al-Tirmidhī grades 2950 ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ and 2951 ḥasan; the Darussalam grading displayed for both is weak. For 2952, he notes criticism of a transmitter and distinguishes learned explanation from speaking without knowledge.
16. Saleh, Walid A. (2013), “The Introduction to Wāḥidī’s al-Basīṭ: An Edition, Translation and Commentary,” in Karen Bauer, ed., Aims, Methods and Contexts of Qurʾanic Exegesis. Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, chapter 3. Edition and translated introduction.
17. Saleh, Walid A. (2013), “The Gloss as Intellectual History: The Ḥāshiyahs on al-Kashshāf,” Oriens 41, pp. 217–259. Author-posted article.
18. Saleh, Walid A. (2021), “The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī: A History of Anwār al-tanzīl,” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies. DOI: 10.3366/jqs.2021.0451. Author-posted article.
19. Al-Tustarī (2011), Tafsīr al-Tustarī, trans. Annabel Keeler and Ali Keeler. Louisville: Fons Vitae. See the translators’ introduction, especially the treatment of Qurʾānic interpretation and spiritual teachings, and the introduction to the commentary. Full translation. Related primary works include al-Sulamī’s Ḥaqāʾiq al-tafsīr and al-Qushayrī’s Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt.
20. Algar, Hamid (2008), “Jaʿfar al-Ṣādeq iii. And Sufism,” Encyclopaedia Iranica XIV/4, pp. 356–362. Scholarly article. The fourfold saying is attributed material, not a prophetic ḥadīth.
21. Nanji, Azim (1987), “Ismaʿilism,” in Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed., Islamic Spirituality: Foundations. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 179–198, especially the discussion of ritual and taʾwīl. Chapter hosted by the Institute of Ismaili Studies. For the polemical term, see Heinz Halm (1988), “Bāṭenīya”, Encyclopaedia Iranica III/8, pp. 861–863.
22. Chittick, William C. (2022), “The Qur’an in the Thought of Ibn ʿArabī,” in George Archer, Maria Dakake and Daniel A. Madigan, eds., The Routledge Companion to the Qurʾan, pp. 282–290. Author-posted chapter. Primary passages discussed include Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, Cairo 1911, II:581, line 11; II:119, line 24; and IV:367, line 3.
23. Chittick, William C., “Ibn ʿArabī,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, especially §§2.1–2.2 and 3.3. Scholarly entry.
24. Al-Qūnawī (1949), Iʿjāz al-bayān fī taʾwīl Umm al-Qurʾān. Hyderabad-Deccan: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, pp. 43–44 and 298–299, as translated and discussed in William C. Chittick (2004), “The Central Point—Qūnawī’s Role in the School of Ibn ʿArabī,” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society 35. Article with translated primary passages.
25. Lory, Pierre (1980), Les commentaires ésotériques du Coran d’après ʿAbd ar-Razzāq al-Qāshānī. Paris: Les Deux Océans. For editions, attribution, and manuscript references, see Stephen Lambden’s University of California Merced research bibliography.
26. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, I.35–37, especially I.36.40–41. Primary text in English.
27. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 10, including reply to objection 3. Primary text in English.
28. Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1998), Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge University Press; especially the 1819 outline. For scholarly exposition, see “Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher,” §4, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
29. Dilthey, Wilhelm (1900), “The Rise of Hermeneutics.” For the relation among experience, expression, and understanding, see “Wilhelm Dilthey”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
30. Heidegger, Martin (1927), Being and Time, §§31–32. For the philosophical context and fore-structure of interpretation, see “Martin Heidegger”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
31. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1989), Truth and Method, 2nd revised English ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Sheed & Ward; Part II, especially the discussion of application and Aristotle. First German edition 1960. See also “Hans-Georg Gadamer”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
32. Ricoeur, Paul (2016), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge University Press. See “The hermeneutical function of distanciation”, pp. 93–106, and “Appropriation”, pp. 144–156. These page numbers refer to the 2016 edition.
33. Hirsch, E. D. (1967), Validity in Interpretation. Yale University Press, chapters 1–2 and 5. Primary chapter previews. Betti, Emilio (1987), “On a General Theory of Interpretation: The Raison d’Être of Hermeneutics,” American Journal of Jurisprudence 32, article 9. Publication record and text access.
34. Iser, Wolfgang (1978), The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Book record. Fish, Stanley (1976), “Interpreting the ‘Variorum’,” Critical Inquiry 2(3), pp. 465–485. Article record.
35. Rahman, Fazlur (1982), Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, chapter 1. Primary text.
36. Abū Zayd, Naṣr Ḥāmid (2004), Rethinking the Qurʾān: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics. Utrecht: Humanistics University Press. University publication record; shortened and modified lecture text.
37. Wadud, Amina (1999), Qurʾan and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, introduction. Book record and preview.
38. Al-Maḥallī and al-Suyūṭī (2007), Tafsīr al-Jalālayn, trans. Feras Hamza. Amman: Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, commentary on Q 1:5. Full translation.
39. Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, no. 395a, Book of Prayer. Arabic text and English translation.
40. Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, commentary on Q 1:4. English translation.
41. Gril, Denis, “Commentaries on the Fātiḥa and Experience of the Being According to Ibn ʿArabī.” See the discussion of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, chapter 5, and the relation of Lord and servant. Scholarly article.