Mulla Sadra Shirazi on The Hermeneutic of The Qur’an

By:  Prof. Latimah S.Peerwani

Traditionally it has been held by the Muslim scholars that tafsir (commentary on The Qur’an) arose as a natural practice originating with Prophet Muhammad himself. The aim of the hermeneutic (i.e. understanding) of The Qur’an and commentary on it was not purely theoretical. It had practical aim as well, which was to make the text applicable to the faith and the way of life of the believers. Over a period of time several genres of commentary emerged in the Islamic milieu. Some broad categories are: textual or literal; legal; theological; philosophical; spiritual; etc.

In this paper we will be briefly looking at Mulla Sadra’s hermeneutic of The Qur’an. Mulla Sadra wrote commentaries upon a number of chapters and verses of The Qur’an. Moreover, he also wrote a number of works dealing with the science of Qur’anic commentary. In his Mafatih al-ghayb (Keys to the Invisible World) he discusses his method and principles of the hermeneutic of The Qur’an.

According to Sadra the language of The Qur’an is equivocal in nature (mutashabih). Equivocality normally implies uncertainty, indetermination, and ambiguousness in the use of a word and that the word in its basic structure has a number of different meanings. The hermeneutic task consists in deciphering the hidden meanings in the apparent, in unfolding meanings implied in the literal meaning. This task, according to Sadra, has not been done by a number of exegetes of The Qur’an. He states in concise terms: “Nothing of that which the exoteric commentators of The Qur’an, such as al-Zamakhshari and those who emulate him, have written is the true knowledge of The Qur’an or gnosis of the Divine Revelation in the true sense. All of that relates to philology, grammar and dialectic, and touches only the shell of the exterior revetment. The true knowledge of The Qur’an is something else”.  (Se Asl, ed. S.H.Nasr, Tehran, 1961, p.84)

What is the true knowledge of The Qur’an according to Sadra? And how can one arrive at this knowledge? In this paper, I will discuss these aspects which will obviously lead us to give some salient features of Sadra’s theory of the language of The Qur’an; his notion of The Qur’an as the “Speech” of God and its implied meaning, the principles and conditions for the hermeneutic of The Qur’an, and his methodology in his exegesis of The Qur’an titled      Tafsir al-Kabir (the Greatest Commentary).

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