Journal of Interdisciplinary Qur'anic Studies
Volume:2 Issue: 1, Winter and Spring 2023

The peresent study aims to address the issue of how occasions of revelation (asbāb al-nuzūl) affect the understanding of the Qur’an. It also provides a basis for evaluating the impact of cultural studies on Qur’anic comprehension in prospective research. To accomplish this objective, the narratives of occasions of revelation were collected from three well-known resources, regardless of their documental and textual credibility, and their role in understanding the relevant verses was quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated. Consequently, twelve qualitative roles were identified and each narration was quantitatively assessed with a score ranging from zero to three. Statistical analysis of the data revealed that 10% of the entire Qur’anic verses have occasions of revelation in the mentioned sources. About 10% of the studied verses (1% of the Qur'an) are completely dependent on the occasions of revelation to be understood, according to the evaluation method and assumptions of the survey. In 72% of the verses (7% of the Qur'an), the occasions of revelation have an impact on a better understanding of the verse, even though in the first encounter the verse has a customary appearance and no ambiguity. Likewise, 8% of the occasions of revelation examined have no impact on the understanding of the verse. Thus, the role of the occasions of revelation on the apparent meanings of the verses, although undeniable, does not create a significant dependency, since the impact of most of these narrations (82%) is as much as a slight improvement in the initial understanding of the verse (scores 1 and 2), so that the occasions of revelation is not the sole means of achieving a secondary understanding of the verse.

The application of the gender approach to the holy books has expanded with the rise of feminism in the modern era. The study and extraction of the gender discourses that dominate these books can help in the reconstruction and understanding of relevant historical features. Comparing the gender approach of these books can also introduce us to paradigm shifts in different historical periods. For this purpose, firstly, we have shown in this study that the Qurʾan employs a moderate, complex and hybrid form of all three feminine, masculine and egalitarian discourses.Secondly, the linguistic/narrative approach to the pre-Qurʾanic scriptures and its comparison with the Qurʾanic approach shows the extent of the masculine and sometimes misogynistic approach of these books. A review of some post-Qurʾanic exegesis and hadith books also shows that their gender discourse is more compatible with the masculine approach of pre-Qurʾanic books than the moderate Qurʾanic approach. Due to the large number of sources required for this research, only the gender discourse in the creation story was chosen as a case study.

This study delves into the concept of consciousness in the Qur'an, comparing it with cognitive science. While cognitive science views consciousness as a function of the brain, the Qur'an employs various terms such as soul (al-nafs), heart (al-qalb, al-ṣadr and al-afʾidah), hearing (al-samʿ), sight (al-baṣar), etc. to describe tools of consciousness. In order to explore the Qur'anic perspective on consciousness and its compatibility with cognitive science, an in-depth analysis of relevant areas pertaining to human consciousness, as well as the capacities of the heart and brain, is essential. Employing an analytical-comparative method with an extra-religious perspective, we extract cognitive terminology associated with consciousness from the Qur'an. By employing graph-based tools to create and analyze a conceptual map of these terms, we find that soul, heart, hearing, and sight emerge as crucial tools for generating consciousness. Of these, the Qur'an highlights the human soul as the primary tool for acquiring and processing consciousness, distinct from the spirit (al-rūḥ). This soul is balanced in such a way that it can collaborate with the body and brain of the human to achieve consciousness.

In both theory and practice, political participation is considered to be one of the most significant political challenges. The Qur'an is the main religious source that makes it possible for political explanations to be given in respect of such issues. This study aims to formulate the types of political participation in an illegitimate political system in order to identify acceptable types in the light of the teachings of the Qur'an. The hypothesis of this research, carried out with the method of thematic interpretation, is that from the Qur'anic perspective, in an illegitimate political system, diverse types of positive and negative participation are authorised, depending on the circumstances, from participation in power structures to conflicting with the aim of reducing or eliminating oppression. In this regard, seven types of positive and negative political participation in an illegitimate political system have been identified in the Qur'an; positive political participation such as criticism and objection, guidance through dialogue and debate, and participation through taqīyah (religious dissimulation); negative political participation such as non-cooperation, civil disobedience, declaration of aversion, and struggle and overthrow. Based on this, the article concludes that according to the Qur'an, various types of positive and negative political participation are permissible in confronting an illegitimate political system. The Qur'an describes the behavior of the prophets and Qur'anic figures in the confrontation with an illegitimate system as a wide range of minimal to maximal participation with the aim of eliminating oppression.

This study was conducted to examine the miraculous nature of verses 55:19-22 in the Qur'an, using four key parameters: Explicitness, Validity, Accuracy, and Precedence. Through this analysis, the true meaning of the verses was studied. Further comparison with other verses revealed that the geological phenomenon described in these verses is where freshwater and seawater meet, forming a river plume. This river plume exhibits all of the characteristics mentioned in the verses as a barrier and point of interaction. Additionally, it provides essential elements such as Calcium for the formation of coral and pearls. Historical data was also examined to demonstrate that at the time of the Qur'an's revelation, it was not known that lime played a role in the structure of pearls and coral, nor was Calcium discovered yet. Therefore, it seems that these verses are a suitable candidate for being considered as the scientific miracle of the Qur'an.

For centuries, naskh (abrogation) has played a critical role in Islamic legal philosophy as a unifying rubric through which Muslim scholars accepted the logic of divine law and their relationship to it. However, this paradigm has been challenged by new competing theories of abrogation. This paper has examined five of them: Non-abrogation theory (Muhammad al-Jabri), dialectic theory (Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid), didactic theory (Abdullah Saeed), punitive theory (Muhammad Mahmoud Taha), and maqāṣidic theory (Jasser Auda). It has been argued that although these theories have contributed to the overthrow of the classical paradigm, only the maqāṣidic theory has the persuasive power to replace it completely. The other theories fell into three basic pitfalls: 1) contradiction (non-abrogation theory); 2) anarchy (didactic and dialectic theory); 3) idealism (punitive theory). Maqāṣidic theorists, however, spurned linguistic arguments and focused instead on legal objectives, debating what God intended, not what He said. This allowed them to appeal to "reason" and "rationality" while maintaining a faithful connection to certain modes of classical legal theory. This enabled them to challenge naskh without appearing to undermine the epistemic foundations of the traditional exegetical worldview, of which naskh is merely one element.

Throughout history, numerous exegetes of the Qur’an have presented interpretations of the verses of the Qur’an in accordance with the customary understanding, while not methodically specifying the extent of the validity of the customary understanding, in the process of interpreting the Qur’an. Hence, it is essential to properly clarify the validity and position of customary understanding in the interpretation of diverse types of verses, such as doctrinal verses, ethical verses, verses concerning social and cultural issues, and scientific verses.
The results of this study indicate that the customary understanding is admissible as an indication and evidence in the interpretation of the Qur’an and can be used to understand all the concepts of the verses at the level of literal meaning, however, at the level of intended meaning it is only allowed for the understanding of specific verses referring to customary practices, not for metaphysical concepts or verses with specific Qur’anic terminology.

As data and context continue to expand, a vast amount of textual content, including books, blogs, and papers, is produced and distributed electronically. Analyzing such large amounts of content manually is a time-consuming task. Automatic detection of feelings and emotions in these texts is crucial, as it helps to identify the emotions conveyed by the author, understand the author's writing style, and determine the target audience for these texts. The Qur’an, regarded as the word of God and a divine miracle, serves as a comprehensive guide and a reflection of human life. Detecting emotions and feelings within the content of the Qur’an contributes to a deeper understanding of God's commandments. Recent advancements, particularly the application of transformer-based language models in natural language processing, have yielded state-of-the-art results that are challenging to surpass easily. In this paper, we propose a method to enhance the accuracy and generality of these models by incorporating syntactic features such as Parts Of Speech (POS) and Dependency Parsing tags. Our approach aims to elevate the performance of emotion detection models, making them more robust and applicable across diverse contexts. For model training and evaluation, we utilized the Isear dataset, a well-established and extensive dataset in this field. The results indicate that our proposed model achieves superior performance compared to existing models, achieving an accuracy of 77% on this dataset. Finally, we applied the newly proposed model to recognize the feelings and emotions conveyed in the Itani English translation of the Qur’an. The results revealed that joy has the most significant contribution to the emotional content of the Holy Qur’an.

The number words in the Qur’an are generally considered to have numerical meanings, while other meanings of these words have been reported under some verses (especially the creation verses). There are diverse cultural-ritual symbols of the number words employed by the people living in different geographical regions of the world from ancient centuries to the present. The peresent research aims to conduct a comparative study of the non-numerical meanings of number words and their numbered objects in the Qur’an and different rituals and cultures, using the method of ritual-cultural symbology, in order to discover and analyze the relationship between the literal meanings of Qur’anic numbers and their symbolic meanings. According to the results of this research, it seems that the non-numerical meanings of number words in the verses of Creation are not metaphors, ironies and parables, and they are possibly symbolic. Moreover, there is a close relationship between the ritual-cultural symbology and the literal meanings of numbers and their associations in the Creation Verses, so it can be suggested that there is a kind of language that all people can understand regardless of culture and geography.

Sustainability has been recognized as one of the greatest challenges facing social systems in the 21st century. Social systems should have the knowledge and the power to lead this transition and to induce the changes towards this new paradigm. In this regard, it is of crucial importance to achieve a correct and comprehensive understanding of the concept of sustainability and its key components. Although some successful studies have been reported, there is a lack of a local framework for investigating the sustainability of social systems in the context of the Islamic approach, as well as the use of a mixed methods approach to support an integrated and holistic conceptualization and implementation of sustainability. This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework for the sustainability of social systems based on the Holy Qur’an and assess its validation in universities, which was conducted in two studies, respectively. In the first study, after extracting the key themes from the Qur’an, the relationship between them was shown in the proposed framework consisting of foundations, principles, factors, and dimensions of sustainability. Then, in the second study, the cross-validation method was used. In this section, confirmatory factor analysis was carried out (N=61) to evaluate the fit, reliability, and validity of the framework. Further, concurrently percentage agreement coefficient of semi-structured interviews (N=10) was used to analyze the internal validity of the framework. The results of both quantitative and qualitative studies confirmed the fit, reliability, and validity of the framework. The present research contributes to this literature by presenting a local framework for the concept of sustainability of social systems based on the Qur’an, in a holistic and inclusive perspective, using a mixed methods approach. This study can be a useful and effective initiator for studies and theoretical extensions in conceptualizing sustainability based on Qur’anic teachings, and also pave the way for the application of this knowledge in the functional-practical areas of social systems in Islamic societies.

The majority of Imamiyah jurists believe that anyone who falsely claims to be a prophet should be sentenced to death. All people can carry out this punishment without needing the permission of the ruling authority. This is contrary to the sound teaching of the Qur'an, which indicates that the primary principle regarding human life is to preserve everyone's blood, and any violation of this principle requires valid justification. Given the importance of the issue, this article will look at the documentation of this sentence and criticise such a view based on the Qur'anic principles. Accepting the notion that the claimant of the prophecy deserves to die (mahdūr al-dam), in the author's opinion, contradicts the necessity of caution in this matter, as the evidence presented is not sufficient to prove the claim. Moreover, this assertion does not seem to be justified in the light of the verse 33 of surah al-Māʾidah, which describes the verdict of corruption on earth (al-ifsād fī al-arḍ). This is because the separate criminalisation of corruption on earth from fighting against Allah (al-muḥārabah) cannot be inferred from the verse in question. Therefore, the punishment of such a person should be determined in the light of the rules and evidence of Sharia punishments i.e. the Ruler of the Sharia should consider the appropriate punishment for him, taking into account the circumstances.