The Islamist Extremist: The World Through My Eyes by Al Qutubi Abdus Sabur

Author:Al Qutubi, Abdus Sabur
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Qutubi Books
Published: 2015-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

By way of examples, for B) consider the verse: “And there entered the prison with him two young men. One of them said, “Indeed, I have seen myself [in a dream] squeezing khamr (wine).”[196] Clearly, wine cannot be squeezed so a literal understanding of the word khamr cannot be supported, it must, therefore, be understood metaphorically to mean grapes. Another example of this, cited by Ghazaali,[197] is the verse: “And ask the city in which we were and the caravan in which we came – and indeed, we are truthful”[198] Again, the literal meaning is untenable since the inanimate town cannot be asked, so the understood meaning is the people of the town.

With regards to A) The Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence argue that a mere physical touching of a women does not invalidate one’s wudu (ablution). “Touch” is to be understood metaphorically to mean sexual intercourse in the verse “or you have touched[199] women” [200] due to the various indicators such as being read in conjunction with a hadith (in Bukhari) on the matter: “The Prophet (s) used to pray for long hours at night in their apartment, and that she used to sleep in front of him. Because the room was small, when the Prophet used to make sajdah (prostration) he would tap her calf with his hand and she would retract her legs so he could make sajdah. And when he stood up she would allow her feet to return to their original position.”

The pertinent point with regards to A) is that it is not a whimsical traversing to the metaphorical. It is grounded in concrete, well-defined rules based on textual indications.

Bertrand Russell noted: “The meanings of words must be fixed, at least for a time, since otherwise no assertion is definite, and no assertion is true rather than false. There must be something more or less constant, if discourse and knowledge are to be possible. This, I think, should be admitted…”[201]

For example, I trust that you, the reader, understand these very words because the words I have written have fixed, well-understood meanings and there is no textual indicator that would lead you to think I was speaking metaphorically. Where there is ambiguity, usually the context provides strong clues as to the intended meaning, but it must be admitted that ambiguity is in the minority of discourse. If words did not have fixed meaning (at least at the time in which they were uttered) then what would be the point in ever writing a book because every single sentence would be subjective, open to interpretation carrying no fixed meaning?

In terms of ambiguity, consider the sentence: “Steve is a right bastard”. The literal meaning of “bastard” is illegitimate son of. But we know that bastard also means colloquially a nasty, difficult person. The fact that the noun is modified by “a right” implies that bastard is being used to imply nastiness and “a right” is describing the magnitude of his nastiness. This processing is automatic and seamless for a native speaker in discerning the intended meaning.

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