A Social Approach to Islamic Texts

The objective of the present research is to investigate the social approach to Islamic texts. The research method employed was reflective analysis, and it was demonstrated that the fundamental relationship between the text and its audience, as well as the text's influence upon the audience, particularly within the sphere of Islamic texts, constitutes a significant subject from the perspective of social sciences. Religious texts have predominantly been viewed through the lens of individual and personal communication. However, on the one hand, the text itself can be regarded as a social phenomenon (State 1); such that it can be viewed from the perspective that its audience is not the individual per se; rather, it is a collective and a society (State 2). On the other hand, fundamentally, a macro-social approach to the text and attention to its intentions and purposes is also a significant necessity in encountering religious texts (State 3). In the first state, approaching religious propositions not merely as a text or report, but as a social phenomenon and an entity possessing social life, and specifically in terms of the reflection it creates in its surrounding environment, is of importance. Emphasizing the second state, in some instances, the outcomes of an individualistic versus a social, and even an attributive (iʿtibārī), view of the text will be entirely different. To attain this perspective, the level of focus on the individual words and syntactical constructions of the text must be elevated to an understanding of the discourse's purpose. Regarding the third state, it must also be stated that within Islamic religious literature, the function of the religious proposition (a singular report [khabar wāḥid] as a linguistic unit, encompassing the Qur’an, "ḥadīth", or historical report) in producing religious knowledge has been discussed under the title of "authoritativeness" (ḥujjiyyah). This approach, based on establishing a direct connection between religious knowledge and the religious proposition, and without regard for a macro perspective connected to the system of semantic equations, is not considered an efficient model for text analysis. Overall, restricting the approach to the text to an individualistic one is, in a way, a confinement of the text within micro spheres; it is necessary, through a shift to the social approach, to also facilitate the utilization of the text within macro social spheres.