An Inquiry into the Guiding Teachings of Surah Araf in Al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Quran

Quran is the most important source of Islamic culture and knowledge that contains human’s guiding affairs including belief, moral, historical, jurisprudential, legal, and economic issues. Given the main aim of revelation of Quran, that is, the guidance of humans, the Prophet Mohammad and Imams explained the guiding teachings of this book in detail for the first time, and then Islamic interpreters and scholars did that. Because Surah Araf is one of the Surahs that speaks about the most basic guiding issues, this study attempts to clarify the most important guiding teachings of this Surah from Allameh Tabatabaei’s viewpoint by applying a library research method and a descriptive-analytical approach for analyzing the data. According to the findings, denying the guardianship of others than God, denying polytheism and idolatry, infallibility in conveying the message, evaluation of actions in the doomsday, learning from the fate of others, the prophets’ educational methods, the effect of prayers on human’s education, fighting against economic deviations, the prohibition of improper imitation of the predecessors, are among the guiding teachings of Surah Araf in Tafsir al-Mizan.