One of the important contributions of scholars of the classical period, to the study of interpretation of the Holy Quran was their acknowledgement of the significance of the maqaam or the context of the situation in determining the meaning of the utterance and providing the criterion for interpreting it. This phenomenon came to be known as :
mutaabaqat al-kalaam li-muqtada’i l-hal ( the conformity of the utterance to the requirements of the situation) .
Al-Khatib al- Qazwani explains:
The context that demands the definite, generalization, advancement of part of a discourse, and inclusion ( of particular words )differs from the context that demands the indefinite, specification, postponement and omission; the context of separation differs from that of joining; the situation that requires conciseness differs from that requiring expansiveness. Discourse with an intelligent person differs from discourse with an obtuse one. Each word with its companion is suited to a particular context. A high standard of beauty and acceptability of speech depends on its appropriateness to the situation and vice versa.
Interestingly enough, these Muslim scholars were ahead of their time by recognizing the role of context in formulating one’s interpretation of the text, a phenomenon only recently propounded by a modern linguist, Malinowsky
. Another key tool for the Quranic exegesis is the internal relationships between different parts of the Holy Quran, expressed by Quranic scholars as:
al-Quran yufassiru ba`duhu ba`dan (different parts of the Quran explain each other). Ibn Taymiyya considers this as the most correct method of tafsir and asserts:
What is given in a general way in one place is explained in detail in another place. What is given briefly in one place is expanded in another.
This old concept of the Quranic studies, may rightly be identified as the concept of “inter-textuality,( Culler 2000, 33 ) within the framework of modern linguistic analysis, which too involves the dependence of one text upon another. Moreover, a thorough examination of the activity of the Quranic exegesis suggests the practice of hermeneutics, a term incorporated into English lexicon only a century and a half ago. The word “hermeneutics” is formed from the Greek infinitive “
hermeneuein”
and is understood to mean: “ to explain, to translate, and to express.”
Gerhard Ebeling attempts to co-ordinate this three-fold meaning with the concept of interpretation.
Conventionally, in Islamic theological usage, the practice of interpretation was referred to as what we now call “tafsir” or exegesis, whereas the enterprise which denoted the various ways and criteria by which an individual may arrive at a particular interpretation came to be known as “ta’wil’ or hermeneutics. While hermeneutics began to appear in Christian theological works only in post-Reformation seventeenth century
, it had already been designated as an underlying principle, requisite for the interpretation of a text, in the classical period of Muslim history. A reading through the works of al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir would attest to this. While the former includes an extensive methodological corpus of literature accumulated in the classical period, and a body of exegetical Hadith along with a linguistic and lexical analysis of the words of the text in his version of the Quranic exegesis, the latter attempts to add considerably to the methodological approaches to the interpretation already posited by his four-centuries senior counterpart. Ibn Kathir outlines a sequence of steps which the Quranic commentators should follow. The first and the best procedure is to “interpret the Quran by the Quran”, followed by an examination of the Sunnah of the Prophet, for it is “a means of laying upon the Qur’an
( shaariha lil Qur’an) and a means of elucidating it
( mudiha lihi ). However, when neither of the Qur’an nor the Prophetic Sunnah provide sufficient resources for the interpretation of the text, Ibn Kathir relies on the meaning and interpretation it would have had for its original readers, that is to say , the Companions of the Prophet, because they were “eyewitnesses to the circumstances and situations with which they were particularly involved.”
This methodology of interpretation is modern-day “hermeneutics of recovery”.
( Culler 2000, 68 ) Moreover, Ibn Kathir includes the non-Muslim material in the interpretation of the Quran, and maintains:
“these are quoted for supplementary attestation
(lil-istishhad), not for full support
(la lil-i-‘tidad).”
While explicating on this additional methodology used by Ibn Kathir in Quranic hermeneutics, McAuliffe argues that while doing so,
The proper course of action is to take into account the various views expresses, ratify the second, reject the false, and then let the matter drop.
The last bit of the position is important lest debate over the truthfulness of the view extend into what is useless and result in digression from the topic under consideration so much so that it is eventually excluded from the main course of discussion.
The third step which Ibn Kathir introduces to his hermeneutical methodology is that of seeking recourse to the sayings of the followers of the Companions, but this he does not compel upon other Quranic exegetes to follow. Finally, Ibn Kathir refrains from positing his conclusion regarding the validity of the opinions, thus exercising an “excoriation of tafsir bi’l-ra’y”.
This silence of a person of his caliber, who is obliged by
religion to share his knowledge with those who seek it,
may not be considered appropriate, but Ibn Kathir seems contented with this act of his while recognizing the limitations to human knowledge. However, Ibn Kathir, like al-Tabari affirms that the interpretations of some things, such as the mutashaabih aayaat ( the ambiguous verses ) should be left to Allah alone. Simultaneously, a corpus on Hadith literature had been compiled and “closed”.
However, unlike the Holy Quran, this interpretive process is not inerrant and inviolate and is thus open to critique and historicization, as opposed to the revelation itself. .
Paul Ricoeur says of texts in general:
A key hypothesis of hermeneutical philosophy is that interpretation is an open process which no single vision can conclude.
The hermeneutical differences are reflective of the differences in conditioning and social forces prevalent in cultures of authors and readers, not to mention differences in education and prejudice. Also, the presence of “natural and artificial homographs ( words that have many meanings ) and the conflicting etymology of many words that have roots that can mean opposite things”
in Arabic language, along with the fact that some verses are said to have abrogated others ( the theory of naskh ) add to the inconclusiveness of the interpretation of the text. However, this is not to say that the Quran itself is variant. What changes is not the Revelation but “the capacity and particularity of the understanding and reflection of the principles of the text within a community of people”
This presumption while reading through the Quranic interpretations is crucial, particularly for women because the misogyny apparent in many of these exegeses and translations of the Holy Quran, has only found a position in Islam via the extra-textual sources. Worst still, when there arose a problem where the Sahih Hadith, which is a source of tafsir, contradicted some of the Quranic provisions, many of the leading jurists and scholars reconciled these conflicts by favouring the Tafsir and Ahadith over the Holy Quran, by including Ijma ( consensus, in which the Ahadith were to be based ) into a source of Shariah, and the interpretive tradition. Barlas argues:
By canonizing the Ijma of the classical/medieval period, al-Shafi’s ruling also canonized the Tafsir ( and religious knowledge ) produced during this era.
Reevaluation and rethinking of Quranic hermeneutics was considered an innovation, or bi`da, thereby confining Muslims to the works of a few learned men, who produced their works in an era notorious for its misogyny. Simultaneously, the Ahadith continued to serve a political function in matters pertaining to state governance and the like, for which the Quran offered no precedents and the scholars enforced a monolithic reading of the Holy Quran and Prophetic Sunnah in purview of the social forces surrounding them
( corruption and prostitution were rampant ).This was the time, when some misogynistic Ahadith were incorporated into the closed official corpus and it is these Ahadith “embodying the prevalent medieval Islamic model of women as dangerous and destructive to political order” (Spellberg 1994, 143), which shaped and continue to influence attitudes towards women. The development of Ahadith implying misogyny is ironic, as Leila Ahmed points out, as Islam is the only major religion that gives women’s accounts in its central texts. This point can be illustrated by the issue of veil. There are two sets of Aayaat in the Holy Quran pertaining to this issue:
O prophet! tell thy wives and daughters, and the believing women, that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad): that is most convenient, that they should be known (as such) and not molested: and Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. Truly if the Hypocrites, and those in whose hearts is a disease, and those who stir up sedition in the City, desist not, We shall certainly stir thee up against them: then will they not be able to stay in it as thy neighbours for any length of time:
The Quran ( 33:59-60; in Ali 1988, 1126-27 )
And,
Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them: and Allah is well acquainted with all that they do. And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands' fathers, their sons, their husbands' sons, their brothers, or their brothers' sons, or their sisters' sons, or their women, or the slaves whom their right hands possess or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex; and that they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments. And O ye Believers! Turn ye all together towards Allah that ye may attain Bliss.
The Quran ( 24:30-31; in Ali 1988, 1126-27 )
The conservatives read these aayaat as giving Muslim males the right to force women to veil themselves on the grounds that the sexuality in women is active and thus, it is necessary to protect Muslim men from the sexually corrupting women, by concealing them behind a hijab. Al-Tabari held that both men and women need not show their genitals only; al-Baydawi ruled that the entire body of a free woman was included in her zeenah; by the seventeenth century, the latter opinion had seeped through the Islamic scholarly research ( in Stowasser 1984, 27 ). One of the pitfalls of these early scholars is that they fail to acknowledge the two models of the notion of the veil: one, specific and the other, general in the Holy Quran; the first set of aayaat is specific while the other suggests the general model. Also, it is important to note that the form, the purpose and the concept of the “veil” in these two aayaat is not the same; the Quran uses the words jilbab (cloak ) and khumur (headscarf), the former covering the bosom and the neck, while the latter covers the head, not the face, hands or feet. Also, in the first set of aayaat, jilbab is meant as a tool serving the dual functions of recognition and protection, thereby implying the social structure prevalent in the early Muslim society where, sexual abuse by non-Muslim men was normative. Thus, it can be safely asserted that the Quran’s treatment of the public and the private display of a woman’s body, is not premised on the view that the body itself is corrupt, despite the fact that the conservative exegetes tend to displace the focus of these aayaat from the sexual misconduct of the Jahili men to believing Muslim women, to essentializing the need to shield them from Muslim men, or alternatively, to shield the latter from the former. However, people who believe that veil is a means to keep women’s sexuality under control, namely the liberal feminists, tend to ignore the Qura’nic link between the jilbab and Jahili society in one set of aayaat, and its definition of sexual modesty in the other, which extends to both men and women.
Barlas, Asma. Believing Women in Islam : Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an. New York: University of Texas P, 2002, p.35 Barlas, Asma. Believing Women in Islam : Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an. New York: University of Texas P, 2002, p.36 