A Comparison of Conceptual Metaphors in the Holy Qur’an and in the Poetry of the Revelation Era

Metaphor is one of the most common and widely-used cognitive processes that can represent the characteristics of the culture and ideology of a society or a school. According to the theory of conceptual metaphor, in metaphors and their linguistic expressions, cognition and culture are intertwined and become a single conceptual combination. What we call conceptual metaphor is as much cognitive as it is cultural in nature. Accordingly, we assume the formation of conceptual metaphors of the Holy Qur’an as related to the culture of the revelation era and in the present analytical-comparative study, by comparing metaphorical expressions in the poems of the Age of Ignorance and ayahs of the Holy Qur’an, a new explanation of the discourse of the relation between the Qur’an and the culture of the revelation era has been obtained. The Holy Qur’an has used the culture of the revelation era and by changing the target domains of metaphors, it has changed the centrality of the world and its related life in the metaphors of the poems of the Age of Ignorance to the centrality of monotheism in its metaphorical expressions, and has thus established a new culture by drawing a worldview of revelation within metaphors. Another finding of this research was that this theory negates "the revelation being influenced by the culture of the revelation era".