The Interpretation of the World of Symbols and Metaphors in Suhrawardi’s Resālat al-Abrāj Based on Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics

Resālat al-Abrāj is one of Suhrawardi’s symbolic stories in Arabic, full of symbols and metaphors asking for a return to the original homeland. Nevertheless, which roles do these symbols and metaphors play in understanding the text, and how should they be interpreted? Paul Ricoeur, one of the contemporary hermeneutics philosophers, considers symbol, metaphor, and narrative very essential as media through which one obtains the knowledge of oneself and one’s surrounding world. Interpreting symbols and metaphors with Ricoeur’s method in Resālat al-Abrāj provides an opportunity to understand Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and his method as well as an illuminated text in the contemporary worldview. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic method is a dialectic between “explanation” and “understanding”: interpretation begins with a semantic explanation of the text, especially symbols and metaphors as places to create new meanings. The interaction between these new meaning fields leads us to the world of the text: the world in which the reader finds the possibility of living and appropriates it. By this method, we understand that the world of Resālat al-Abrāj reminds the sacred call to “Return” to the illuminated homeland, and rouses the love towards this homeland for those who find themselves in deep darkness. This illuminated world threatens the current world of contemporary humans, because the concept of the sacred homeland may be a false consciousness. However, the world of the text, by reminding ontological darkness, points out deceits of consciousness. This new possibility results in the fundamental development of the reader’s world and his self-knowledge.