the Qur’an

One of the remarkable aspects of the holy Qur’an is the use of diverse linguistic methods to convey a particular idea. This study aims to evaluate the commissive act in the Qur’an using Searle's speech act theory, a theory useful in comprehending deeper semantic levels of holy scriptures. The study used a descriptive-analytical method, and the data were analyzed through a qualitative analysis of statistical results to answer the following questions: What linguistic forms does the Qur’an use to represent commissive speech acts? And what themes or topics are included in these commissive speech acts' utterances? First, employing a desk research approach, the Qur’anic verses containing the commissive speech acts were selected based on syntactic, lexical, and semantic criteria. The distinguishing characteristics of each case were then identified, including the discursive structure of the act, the committed person, and the theme of the commitment. Finally, the relationship between the linguistic form and the theme of the speech acts was examined. The findings reveal that the Qur’an expresses commissive speech acts through four linguistic structures: oath, promise (al-wa‘d), threat (al-wa‘īd), and pledge; each includes divine and non-divine conceptions, and each has a unique characteristic. The quantitative comparison of these four shows that “promise” is the most commonly cited sub-speech act, distinguishing it from other linguistic forms. “Threat”, “oath”, and “pledge” are the other most frequently cited sub-speech acts. Moreover, the evaluation of the speech agents and their status as aspects of the situational context reveals that the speech participants are not equal in terms of position and power, which is a decisive factor in the selection of linguistic forms. In all of these cases, the language structures and their intricacies, particularly modality (modal marking), illustrate the relationship between the linguistics style and power dynamics between the participants. The focus of the themes, domain, and frequency differ throughout the four categories mentioned above, with some overlap in certain instances.

The Holy Qur'an is the only revealed scripture that is immune of distortion, and includes the plan of human guidance, in all ages and for all individuals, whose verses must be comprehended accurately and correctly. This has proposed various exegetical theories by exegetes for many years. How can we provide a way to make these theories applicable, and determine a method to avoid them of engaging in interpretive relativity, interpretive pluralism, and even interpretive anarchism? Is it possible to provide such a model? Descriptive analytical procedure introduces the efficacy of an exegetical theory in terms of methodological criteria such as non-interference of exegete’s presumptions, the development of theories without the development of lexical meanings, the relation of language and culture of the time, the recognition of goals of verses and surahs, the identification of the outward and inward levels, etc. all lead to discover deeper levels of understanding of the Qur’an and result in quantitative and qualitative expansion of understanding the divine verses. It causes a valid and firm exegetical theory among others.

The present study centered around the problem of functional equivalence in source-text-target-text pairs. In fact, this study was an attempt to investigate patterns of professional translators’ main approaches to the production of functionally equivalent Qur’ānic translations. The ultimate objective was to investigate the practicality of Reiss’s theoretical functionalist text-oriented model of translation. Hence, five selected English translations were descriptively and linguistically analyzed and compared with their corresponding Qur’ānic surahs. The analysis included content-specific and formal features of the texts to discover common and frequent translation strategies applied in the production of each target text. The descriptive findings were then calculated using frequency and percentage. The findings on the translations of the informative and expressive texts revealed that Reiss’s relevant prediction was right. However, in contrast to Reiss’s view, the operative text was mostly translated literally rather than adaptively by most of the translators.

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.