The Holy Quran

Muslims believe that the The Holy Quran is the message of God Almighty which has been transmitted to His messenger, Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), through revelation in the Arabic language. This Holy book has been translated into many languages, including English. Although the content of the The Holy Quran has been translated into the English language, few studies have been conducted to explore the beneficial effects of The Holy Quran verses on learning English. This study investigated whether using the The Holy Quran’s verses to teach English grammar improves the grammar learning and enhances motivation of high school EFL learners. To this end, 40 homogeneous participants were selected from a high school and then were assigned into two different groups (experimental vs. control). All the learners in the two groups took a grammar pretest, as well as a motivation questionnaire. The experimental group learners were exposed to Quranic verses in their English classes, while the control group learners attended their regular language classes. Finally, the participants took a grammar posttest as well as a motivation and an attitude questionnaire. The results of the one-way ANCOVA showed that the performance of the participants in the experimental group outweighed that of the control group. The statistical analysis of the attitude questionnaire showed that positive attitudes were formed in the students towards this technique of teaching grammar via The Holy Quran verses in English.

The “Story-Based Language Teaching (SBLT)” is one of the most effective approaches in language pedagogy that addresses various elements and parameters in different texts. The aim of this study is to locate SBLT elements in one of the popular Holy Quran’s stories; namely, Abraham`s story known as a pedagogical text, based on Javadi Amoli (2006) and Farhadian’s (2011) Quranic pedagogical frameworks. To this end, the corpus of 130 verses containing the Abraham narration from various surahs was scrutinized and analyzed to extract their precious methods and strategies. To do that, the coding system was utilized to account for the frequency of the predominant method. Upon completion of the coding procedure, the inter-rater (coder) reliability was estimated and the results were confirmed by 81% reliability. The results illustrated that most of the Quranic pedagogical methods proposed by Javadi Amoli (2006) and Farhadian (2011) are manifested in Abraham`s story and some other methods were found by the present researcher through further analysis. The above-mentioned methods from the most repeated to the least ones are Storytelling, Repetition, Precise look, Wisdom, Encouragement, Socratic method, excellent examples, Sympathy, Metaphor, Parable method, Prayer, punishment, Discussion, Debate, Simile, Observation, Experience, Legislation, Holistic view, and Exemplification, respectively. Furthermore, it was confirmed that the dominant instructional methods in this story were inductive and explicit. The findings contribute to Quranic courses syllabus design and teaching pedagogy.

Despite the huge bulk of research conducted on translation quality assessment, the literature on the translation of the Holy Quran is in its infancy. Since jurists, commentators, and Quranic interpreters analyze individual Quranic verses as a whole discourse and in relation to other verses and Surahs, it is deemed necessary for translators to follow the same procedure and consider the wholeness of the text in their translation of individual verses. Coherence is among linguistic properties that contribute to the wholeness of the Quran as a unique discourse. A literature review shows that coherence has a direct effect on the quality of translations. Thus, this research intended to investigate the effect of coherence on the translation quality of some famous translations of the Holy Quran from an instructional viewpoint. To this aim, a mixed-methods study was employed in which the effect of coherence on reading comprehension of 12 Ph.D. candidates enrolled in an ESP course was studied. In the qualitative phase, utilizing linguistic markers, samples of coherent translations were extracted from the 30th chapter of the Quran. Then, two reading comprehension tests were developed from the coherent samples and the corpus without coherent markers. In the next step, these tests were administered to participants. The data were analyzed through a t-test. Findings showed that coherent translations enjoy post-posed/pre-posed concessive, sense continuity, backgrounding, explicitation, and addition as coherence markers. Also, quantitative findings showed a significant difference between the tests taken by the participants at two different times (t (11) = 4.204 and p = 0.001) proving the meaningful effect of coherence on translation comprehension.

Talent is a fundamental quality in humans that entails personal and social differences. However, despite its importance, relatively few empirical studies have addressed identification and assessment of talents. An adequate exploration of any topic will require extensive knowledge about it. The Holy Quran, as the very words of the Creator, who created humans with a certain structure of existence, presents the most comprehensive knowledge. Therefore, this study drew on the Quran to present indicators for talent assessment using a qualitative approach. First, among all verses of the Quran, those with words somehow related to talent were selected, leading to a semantic web, which was then used to create a list of the most relevant words. Next, lexical and conceptual analyses and Quranic usage analyses of these words, along with content analyses of the verses containing them using tadabbur (Quranic Contemplation) methods, marked three words ( ni’mah – pleasant asset, sabīl – course, and faẓl – added privilege) as the main indicators for talent assessment. The findings showed that each of these indicators could be assessed in three areas, or axes, which included level of knowledge, level of yearning and level of access. Finally, the study suggests that, thanks to the comprehensive nature of the knowledge provided in the Quran, exploring the characteristics, components and dynamics of the three main words results in a far more wholistic framework for assessing human talents, which allows for more reliable and applicable results - compared to those provided by individualistic frameworks.

Although cynicism is generally considered anti-religious, in fact, it is inseparable from the true faith of religion. There are two types of cynicism: the first one is being faithful and the second one is being atheistic. An epistemological and psychological study of faith have viewed the essential element of faith. True religious faith is the wisdom of restlessness. Cynicism is what energizes the faith. In this article with library method it is shown that faith expands with faith. Cynicism is neither offensive nor erroneous nor a guilt; rather it is a component of religious faith.

The light of science and civilization has absorbed the contemporary people as if it has led them to the promised palaces of humanity and all problems have been solved by the hands of these two elements. Nevertheless, the crisis of absurdity and frustration have destroyed man from inside. We believe that the shining teachings of the Holy Qur’an, which indeed originate from the source of revelation, can well guide the intellectual and then the practical dimension of man so that there will be no room for despair and spiritual gaps. The reason behind the success of this healing version is that it was issued by the Creator of man and the universe, Who, in addition to good qualities, demands the growth and development of man. This article aims to analyze the basic strategy of the Holy Qur’an for the intellectual nourishment of man, on the one hand, and to satisfy the practical dimension of man, on the other.     Keywords

This comparative study sought to explore the translation of requests between God and Prophet in Holy Quran with focus on pragmatic approach. More specifically, the study highlighted the applied techniques in the translations of Quranic verses based on Bach and Harnish's (1979) model. It further analyzed the differences between the translations and examined the translations accuracy in rendering imperatives’ pragmatics. In doing so, some Surah with the most imperative examples were selected as source text, and two English translations of Holy Quran by Ali (1989) and Arberry (1955) were selected as target text. Based on the data, three types of the techniques as "requestives", "questions", and " requirements" were employed in the most of verses with 9 cases, and "prohibition" found in 6 cases. The identified differences between two translations listed as finding the right equivalents, choosing the correct verb, finding meaning faithfully, preserving the imperative function, selecting the common words in TL, etc. The results also indicated some inaccuracies as lexical and pragmatics, finding right pronoun, transferring the illocutionary force of the source words into the TT, and emphasizing on the same theme with different syntactic form. However, most verses provided the accurate factors as word order, transferring the imperative function based on the first interpretation, adding some words to clarify the context, conveying the intended function through applying the exclamation mark, and keeping culture-specific notion. It is worth mentioning that in most cases, the translators could successfully convey the meaning of Arabic words in to the English ones.

The ability to read fluently is a critical skill for language learners in foreign language contexts. Learning to read Arabic texts for Persian language learners is not an exception. The importance of this reading is more recognized when these learners are faced with religious texts including the holy Quran. Iranian readers of the Quran have many difficulties in uttering and pronouncing Arabic words and letters which blocks their fluency. Traditional approaches toward reading fluency such as teacher model have not been very successful. Therefore, the current research has investigated the effect of dynamic assessment on promoting learning fluency of Iranian learners of Arabic. Deeply rooted in mediated interaction and learning in zone of proximal development (ZPD), dynamic intervention is a new instructional strategy toward language learning. The current research has adopted an inventory of mediational strategies (Aljaafreh and Lantolf, 1994) of interventionist dynamic assessment to intervene learning hotspots and promote fluency of intermediate Quranic learners of teacher training centers in Qum. To this aim 20 students were selected through convenience sampling and their scores were compared in a quasi-experimental design. These students were assigned to two experimental groups where one of them underwent dynamic intervention while the other was recruited in a traditional teacher modeling course. Their scores in the post-test were analyzed through t-test. The findings showed that dynamic intervention promoted reading fluency of Iranian Quranic readers more than traditional approaches. Dynamic intervention can be replaced with traditional instructional methods by Iranian Quranic teachers and promote reading fluency significantly.

God Almighty, as the only creator of the universe, has taken charge of the creation and engineering of the creature system and created the best creatures in the best possible way and in the best quality. In the meantime, some of the creations of God the Almighty have been created so desirable that they are mentioned in the Holy Qur'an as blessed creatures. Identifying the differentiation of these creatures helps others to become acquainted with the criteria of a creature and to increase their usefulness. For this reason, the present article attempts to study the word "blessing" in the Holy Quran using the "semantics" method. And analyze the criteria that made them distinct and blessed. The general interest in having and helping to guide humanity quickly is one of the criteria of a blessed creature whose components are explained in this article.