قرآنی الفاظ کے معنوی تغیرات اور تفسیری ترجیحات: ابتدائی تفسیر سے معاصر تفاسیر تک ایک تاریخی و لسانی مطالعہ

Semantic Change in Qur’anic Vocabulary and Interpretive Preferences: A Historical and Linguistic Study from Early Exegesis to Contemporary Tafsir

Abstract

This study investigates how the meanings of key Qur’anic terms have been understood, delimited, and redirected across the history of Muslim exegesis, and why exegetes have preferred certain senses over others. It proceeds from the premise that semantic change in the Qur’anic lexicon is neither a simple linguistic drift nor an ideologically neutral process; it is the cumulative outcome of the interaction between lexical usage, prophetic explanation, juristic and theological specialization, and the shifting intellectual horizons of interpreters. Drawing on modern semantics (Bréal, Bloomfield, Ullmann), Toshihiko Izutsu’s semantic-field analysis, and the Arabic uṣūlī doctrine of linguistic, sharʿī, and customary senses of a word, the article develops an analytical framework that distinguishes narrowing, broadening, transfer, and reorientation of meaning. This framework is applied to a set of representative terms (ẓulm, ṣalāt, zakāt, kufr, taʾwīl, jāhiliyya, and jihād), to the four terms (ilāh, rabb, dīn, ʿibāda) emphasized by Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī, and to the interpretive dispute over the verb ḍaraba in Qur’an 4:34. The analysis traces the movement from prophetic and Companion-era glosses, through the classical commentaries of al-Ṭabarī, al-Zamakhsharī, al-Rāzī, and al-Qurṭubī, to modern works such as Tafhīm al-Qur’ān, Fī Ẓilāl al-Qur’ān, and al-Taḥrīr wa-l-Tanwīr, as well as the hermeneutical approaches associated with Fazlur Rahman, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, and Abdullah Saeed. Following a thesis–evidence–counterargument–synthesis structure, the study argues that interpretive preference is governed by an implicit hierarchy of criteria (lexical evidence, textual context, transmitted explanation, and legal or ethical purposes) whose relative weights vary by school and era. It concludes that responsible modern exegesis must distinguish between the legitimate recovery of a word’s original semantic field and the anachronistic projection of contemporary concepts onto the text, and it proposes methodological controls for that distinction, offering a historically grounded model for evaluating interpretive claims in contemporary Qur’anic scholarship and exegetical practice.