Context and its Function in At-Tabir Al Qur'āni: Analyzing Fadhel Saleh al-Samarrai's Viewpoint

Context is one of the categories of rational reasoning and the best indication to meticulously discover ayah's meaning for the commentators, linguists, and rhetoricians. The main concern of the present study, carried out using deduction and through selecting a number of Quranic ayahs is explicating, assessing and describing the manner of the use of context in the book entitled At-Tabir Al Qur'āni authored by the Iraqi scholar Fadhel Saleh al-Samarrai. While rejecting repetition, and aiming at depicting literary manifestations of the Quranic miracle, he has explained the mystery of mutashābih ayahs and has proved how each word is so fixed in its place that cannot be replaced by a similar word because it is mingled with the word's spirit and with discourse, i.e. context. One of the important yardsticks for his explanation is the connection of words and syntax with meaning in rhetorics. Drawing on preceding scholar's opinions and books such as Abū Ḥayyān al-Gharnāṭī's Milāk al-ta’wīl and comparing their views with intratextual and intertextual context, he has found novel semantic subtleties that can be considered context-based semantic expansion.