نشریه رهیافت هایی در علوم قرآن و حدیث
سال چهل و چهارم شماره 1 (پیاپی 88، بهار و تابستان 1391)

Abū al-Jārūd is one of the leading figures of Zaydis and the narrator of the significant books and traditions of Imam al-Ṣādiq (A.S.) and Imam al-Bāqir (A.S.), who has received the attention of the Imāmī rijālīs (biographers) and dignitaries. On one hand, the Imāmī and Sunnī rijālīs have weakened him and, on the other hand, he is known as the transmitter of many and sometimes important traditions in the Imamī sources. Knowing how his aḥādīth have found their way into the Imāmī ḥadīth sources as well as the subject and content of the traditions related from him therein is possible through studying Abū al-Jārūd’s books and transmitters of ḥadīth. These studies show that sometimes Abū al-Jārūd’s fame and reputation have caused some of the zealous and biased traditions to be attributed to him. Ibn ‘Uqda and his disciples have incorporated Abū al-Jārūd’s Tafsīr, which is one of the Imāmī’s most important exegetical sources, into the Imāmī sources and, in some instances, have presented Zaydi’s impressions of the exegesis of the Qur’ānīc verses, the samples of which can be seen in Tafsīr al-Qummī.

Raising epistemological discourses in the interdisciplinary science of philosophy have prompted various researchers of science to examine the general principles governing human sciences and knowledge from a different perspective. As a result, the philosophy of the Qur’ānic sciences, as one of the Islamic interdisciplinary sciences, has the intention to study the nature, issues, fundamentals, and functions of the Qur’ānic sciences and their relations to other sciences on the basis of the principles and fundamentals of epistemology, in order to open newer horizons in the epistemological domains of the Qur’ānic sciences to the general public.

The Qur’ān is the last of the Revealed Scriptures that undertakes the guidance of humankind till the end of the history. The continuous development of human life and the appearance of new needs have turned this Divine guidance into a permanent necessity. There is disagreement among the Islamic scholars concerning how to utilize the Qur’ān’s guidance for the generations in the post-Revelation era. Some believe that the Qur’ānic terms have constant and determined meanings, which in no way is possible to be expanded, and yet some others believe it to be possible. Using structuralism as a text analysis approach and by presenting working procedures such as: expansion of meaning (in reliance on allusion, metaphor, allegory, allusive proposition, and the like), segmentation and creation of new meanings, coding the interior and the exterior, planning structuralist levels of meaning, hermeneutic discourse with the text, planning comprehensive patterns, and other similar instances, this article considers as possible the expansion of the Qur’ānic ma‘ārif and confirms it using the traditions and the views of exegetes. More details of the working procedures and their evidences are to be found in the article.

Logos (λογος) is one of the significant concepts in most of the philosophical and religious schools. This notion is noticed in the ancient Greek philosophy, Old Testament, and among the Jewish Filon and Christianity. In Christianity, Jesus (A.S.) and Logos are taken as identical. On the other hand, the “word” Logos is called God. With respect to this issue, in the first place there is willy-nilly a similarity between the two religions of Christianity and Islam concerning Logos/Word. However, the Muslim exegetes, in the verses that refer to Jesus (A.S.) as Word, have interpreted it as kun (be) and have repudiated him of any divine and eternal attributes. However, Logos in Christianity is always presumed to be eternal and divine and this is one of the major and fundamental discrepancies in Christianity and Islam concerning Logos/Word.

The Qur’ān’s Verses of Challenge (āyāt al-taḥaddī), consisting of form and content, concerns their Divinity, and the similitude in the taḥaddī verses of the Qur’ān means the equivalence and identicalness to the Qur’ān verses of what is brought up.The perspectives of the polytheists (and all the addressees) towards the Qur’ān interferes in the taḥaddī of the Qur’ān; and claiming taḥaddī from the Qur’ān cannot be interpreted as free from the occasions of Revelation and the addressee’s viewpoints.From among the four criteria of similitude, i.e. “giving guidance”, “new order and novel content”, “orderliness”, and “efficacy”, the “new order and novel content of the Qur’ān” seems to be the most significant of all. In this criterion, the attribute of ḥadīth (unprecedented) is used for the Qur’ān and refers to the innovations of this Book in form and content and has probably been of concern to the rhetoricians and theologians, who have been more interested in the rhetorical aspects of the Qur’ān. If there is no innovation in the Qur’ān, taḥaddī to it would be meaningless. Imitation of the referent (madlūl) and content of the Qur’ān and also of its word form in response to taḥaddī of the Qur’ān, is lack of knowledge and unawareness of the principles of antilogy, as by fully imitating the order and synthesis of the Qur’ān and alteration of some of its words as well as plagiarizing from the Qur’ān, the proponents of the Qur’ān think they have responded to the taḥaddī of the Qur’ān.

One of the most important factors for the orientalists’ casting doubt on the authenticity of the tradition texts has for over one century been the verbal transmission of ḥadīth and widespread opposition to the writing of ḥadīth. Up to the 70’s of the twentieth century, the two main parties of dispute concerning the nature of the sources of early ḥadīth collections have been Goldziher and Sezgin, the first of whom stressed the orality of these sources and the second emphasized its being written. Gregor Schoeler has since the mid 80’s of the twentieth century up to now tried in various studies to reduce the contradiction between these two approaches. His theory on “the connection and bond between the oral and written transmission in the Islamic education system” has put an end to many of the disputes. The most important components of this theory are: special attention to the characteristics of education and learning system in the early Islamic centuries; distinction between the textbooks and the ordinary books; the publication way of the works and the role of narrators in this process; distinction between the heard (masmū‘) transmission and the oral transmission; distinction between the issue of authenticity and the sources as being written; explanation of the similarities, differences, and the effect of various education systems on each other, study of the effects of the ḥadīth experts’ procedures on other fields of science; distinction between different methods of publishing religious documents, letters, poetry, and teachings.