The Implicit and Verbal Investigation of Concepts Related to Women and ‎Family in the Holy Quran

The present study was conducted with the aim of identifying implicit and verbal meanings of concepts related to women and family in the Holy Quran.

The current study is an applied research in terms of purpose and is a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analyses with the Delphi approach. The research statistical population, in the quantitative section, includes all verses of the Holy Quran (6236 verses) in 114 suras and in the qualitative section, it comprises 21 experts in the field of Quranic sciences and women and family studies. The sample was first selected through purposive sampling method. 2 experts from each field were identified. Then, they were determined by experts using the snowball method. For data collection and analysis, sample interpretation was used for keyword extraction, MAXQDA software was applied for determining concepts and categories and SPSS 20 was employed for Kendall test.

The concepts related to women were classified into 9 categories and 65 subcategories, which have been verbally and implicitly provided in 88 suras of the Holy Quran. They have been verbally mentioned 168 times in 111 verses of the Holy Quran and have been implicitly stated 1626 times in 501 verses. Family-related concepts were classified into 21 categories and 217 subcategories, which exist verbally and implicitly in 106 suras of the Holy Quran. They have been verbally mentioned 711 times in 435 verses of the Holy Quran and have been implicitly stated 6409 times in 1107 verses. In verbal concepts related to women, “Surah Nisa” with 16 verses and in implicit concepts, “Surah Baqarah” with 36 verses have the most keywords in the field of women. In family-related concepts, most of the keywords belong to “Surah Yusuf” with 39 verbal verses and 69 implicit verses. The checklist prepared by the Delphi technique was approved by experts in Quranic sciences and women and family studies. Kendall test was used to assess the consensus of experts. In the second round, agreement was reached among the members of the expert group on all categories. The W value in all categories is greater than 0.7, which suggests a very high level of consensus among the experts.

The Holy Quran has paid a great deal of attention to the field of women and family. In the field of women, the Holy Quran’s greater emphasis is on the issues and characteristics related to women, exemplary women, girls and praiseworthy characteristics of women. In the field of family, Quran has put stress on children, spouse, father, marriage, brother and mother.