The Inner Meaning of the Holy Quran

The inner self (‘batin’) in the Quran is set in opposition to the outer appearance (‘zaher’). ‘Batin’ may have a variety of interpretations the most well-known of which are intended to be documented in this paper. Different interpretations of ‘batin’ based on different opinions are as follows: 1) Those interpretations arrived at by the researcher's inference from the verdicts; 2) those interpretations extracted from the neighboring and suggestive meanings which have no direct relations to the words themselves and are only arrived at by reasoning; 3) those interpretations gained by comparing different verses in the Quran called ‘jari’; and finally 4) those interpretations gained by relating a verse to other verses the researcher likes the most. The way of interpretations in stages 3 and 4 are not always extracted from the forms and the outer appearances of the verses, thus some interpreters have mixed wrongly the two stages. This paper in particular attempts to demonstrate differences of approach in stages 3 and 4 with rejection of the latter approach.