The Structure and Expanse of the Qur ānic Ma ārif

The Qur’ān is the last of the Revealed Scriptures that undertakes the guidance of humankind till the end of the history. The continuous development of human life and the appearance of new needs have turned this Divine guidance into a permanent necessity. There is disagreement among the Islamic scholars concerning how to utilize the Qur’ān’s guidance for the generations in the post-Revelation era. Some believe that the Qur’ānic terms have constant and determined meanings, which in no way is possible to be expanded, and yet some others believe it to be possible. Using structuralism as a text analysis approach and by presenting working procedures such as: expansion of meaning (in reliance on allusion, metaphor, allegory, allusive proposition, and the like), segmentation and creation of new meanings, coding the interior and the exterior, planning structuralist levels of meaning, hermeneutic discourse with the text, planning comprehensive patterns, and other similar instances, this article considers as possible the expansion of the Qur’ānic ma‘ārif and confirms it using the traditions and the views of exegetes. More details of the working procedures and their evidences are to be found in the article.