Solutions for Conflicts in Quranic Theorizing

The Holy Quran is a divine guide to happiness and perfection. Benefiting from its guidance requires seeking out its opinion on various issues. In order to understand the Qur'an, one must consider all the verses related to the research problem and have a general and collective understanding of them. In some cases, an initial seeming conflict is felt between the verses related to the research problem, which should be resolved through identifying the type of conflict.Through a descriptive-analytical method and with the aim of helping Quranic theorists, this article examines the types of contradictions between the verses and the ways to resolve them. There is no real and irresolvable conflict between the verses of the Qur'an, and if an inconsistency is felt between some of the verses collected to lead us to the opinion of the Holy Quran, we can strengthen and prefer one of the verses with internal or external evidence by using the right solutions. These solutions include: preferring the naṣṣ (a verse with one exclusive and explicit meaning) over the ẓāhir (a verse with different possible meanings, one of which is more acceptable), preferring the specified verse over the general, preferring the general verse that cannot be specified over the general that can be specified, preferring the qualified verse over the absolute, preferring the general verse over the absolute, conventionally narrowing or extending the subject of one of the verses, really narrowing the subject of one of the verses according to religious devotion, considering the subject of each verse to be different in cases where a word has different meanings in the two verses, recognizing different referents of a concept in the two verses, and considering the existence of a special condition in each of the verses.