A Study of the Semantics of Prayer in the Holy Quran in Three Steps

Semantics is part of modern linguistics (descriptive and constructivist linguistics). Semantics seeks to study and examine the conditions for the production of meaning and its reception by the reader. In fact, the author does not look at the work as a grammatical production and takes a new look at the culture of the word and the ideology that governs it. Hence, it is different from the exegesis. This method has been used among Orientalists such as Izutsu and some Islamic scholars. The present study, with the help of semantic knowledge, deals with the concept of prayer in the Holy Quran in three steps with an approach to micro and macro axes and the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. In the first step, it examines the lexical semantics of prayer based on its situational and lexical meaning and studies the “ideological and ethnic culture of the pre-Islamic Arabs". The second step to reach the meaning of the word prayer deals with the semantic network of synonymous words, antonym words, and entailed words related to prayer in the Qur'an. In the last step, this study deals with the "textual analysis" of prayer and also the definition of prayer and examines its key and focal words in the Qur'an.