The Role of Modern Punctuation Marks in Understanding the Holy Quran (the Case of Dash and Parenthetical Sentences)

The Quran is one of the most widely-read books in the current era and since the spread of Islam in all parts of the world, this divine book began to be studied by many people around the world. To date, non-Arab tribes due to lack of proficiency in Arabic, historically have somewhat had problems in understanding and reading Quranic ayahs. Islamic scholars, in early Islamic centuries, through establishing certain signs similar to punctuation marks, brought about a great development in facilitating the reading of the Quranic ayahs. These signs did not include all new punctuation marks and were limited to some of them. On the other hand, understanding these signs is bound to knowledge of Tajwid and recitation, which many people lack. Using marks understandable to everyone and international, and inclusive of all punctuation marks is an urgent need to understand the Holy Quran. One of the forgotten important punctuation marks in punctuating ayahs, is dash that is equivalent to parenthetical sentences in Arabic literature. This article seeks to build an easy and understandable way to read and understand parenthetical sentences of the Quran using dash. The authors reached this conclusion, through content analysis, that distinguishing this type of sentence from other syntactic and rhetorical sentences, greatly influences the understanding of ayahs.