Argumentative Discovery of the Structure and Purpose of Sārah al-Taḥrīm: A Comprehensive Approach

Sūra al-Taḥirīm is one of the short Sūras of the Qurʾān. Although the commentators have shown a wide attention to the special themes of this Sūra, such as the reference to al-Tawba al-Naṣūḥ (Persistent remorse for a sin), or the Jurisprudential order of banning a legitimate act, they have interpreted most of its verses scattered and separate from each other; It is as if there is no connection between the different verses of the Sūra. Of course, few commentators, mostly contemporaries, believed in the structural unity of this Sūra, and tried to discover its structure and purpose based on such a unity; But in practice, each of them reached a different result from the others by using his own manner, and it seems that none of them has been able to review all the evidence based on an objective view and not face them selectively. The current study is an attempt to analyze the structure and discover the purpose of Sūra al-Tahirim by using a comprehensive method including all the methods of the predecessors, and with an effort to present an objective and reasoned analysis of the structure and purpose of the Sūra. It is necessary to defend this hypothesis that contrary to the opinion of most previous commentators and contemporary scholars, the verses of the Sūra are not in the position of explaining the moral manner of confronting the spouses in the family environment, but as a warning against the activity of traitorous elements around the family of Muhammad the Prophet. Apart from the different explanation of the purpose of the Sūra obtained in this study, the method of analyzing the structure and purpose of the Sūra in this study is also innovative. This method can be called the “comprehensive method of identifying the meaning of the Sūra” and is presented in this study for the first time.