A Semantic Approach to Newly Emerging Cultural Issues in the Eyes of the Holy Qur’an (Case Study: Consumption as Zakat)

The main concern in the field of the Qur’anic studies is to exactly and systematically understand the meanings and text of the Qur’an, triggering appearance of various sciences and their growth, but considering the exact text and language of the Qur’an and the newly emerging cultural issues like consumption, this question is posed that “what is the right method to have a new understanding and a suitable response to this with the spatial-temporal exigencies?” and which one of new research methods has an effective performance in systematic developing the common interpretative methods?” This paper is formulated based on an analytic-descriptive methodology and usage of semantic method and its systematic function and being presented as an approach in developing the Qur’anic studies based on a response to the issue of consumption. A consumption that caused satisfaction of needs in the past, affected by modernity, turned from consumption of meaning into consumption of object (based on natural rules and economic sciences) and in continuity, into consumption of consumption or the semiotic consumption. The present article drew the conclusion, with a semantic approach, that macro-sense field of purification in the Qur’an has incorporated the approved consumption process including the central sense, method, degree, origin, rules and rulings and the Qur’an has given the meaning of consumption with the process of zakat; a process whose can recalled as “purifying consumption”. The purifying consumption is based on need rather than distinction and seeks after creating moderation and modification of instinct of acquisitiveness as well as lessening the rich-poor gap. It aims to develop and preserve piety and finally gaining the good life and its opposite point of extravagance and being welfare affected.