The Methodology of Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid’s Interpretative Approach in Reading the Religious Texts

The Present paper is to explore the Egyptian thinker and intellectual ,Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid’s interpretative approach. He has followed a kind of historiography of symbolic interpretation of religious texts in the framework of linguistic studies throughwhich he has got to his own method of reading the religious texts. Because of his influence on critical-literal studies in Arabian world ,this paper is to study his interpretative approach of reading the religious texts which will help us to understand the roots of his thinking method and its requirements and also the implications of his thought. The method of doing this research is descriptive-analytic and the author is to study both how Abu Zaid’s methodology was formed and the theoretical presumption of his interpretative approach. Then the different dimensions of his methodology will be explained and finally the paper comes to the conclusion that Abu Zaid , both benefitting from history of symbolic interpretation in Islamic history(especially the theological approach of Mutazilites, Ash’arites and mystical approach of Ibn-e-Arabi)and benfitting from modern symbolic interpretation approach, has employed a combined methodology and used the method of symbolic interpretation in the frame work of” linguistic rules” and later on used the interpretative approach to explain ” the meaning of life “.