Rational Trend in Interpretation – A Study of the Issue of Metaphor in the Qur’an According to the Mu’tazila

The study of “metaphor” is one of the most important topics in rhetoric, and it has not received an independent study that aims to investigate the circumstances of its emergence, and the effect of the Qur’an in determining its nature and function in eloquent expression. Researchers have pointed to the effect of the Mu’tazila in particular in maturing the concept of “metaphor” through their constant efforts to deny popular perceptions of the divine self and its actions. However, these references came in the context of a broader topic, which is the topic of the literary image in Arabic criticism. These references were credited with alerting the researcher, Dr. Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, to the importance of the topic. He worked in this book on studying it in detail, aiming to reveal that close relationship between Mu’tazilite thought and the study of metaphor in the Qur’an. This relationship had an impact in directing the study of metaphor in a special direction in the study of poetry and prose alike. The researcher’s study was divided into an introduction and three chapters. The introduction deals with the emergence of Mu’tazilite thought and attempts to explain it in light of the social circumstances of Islamic society in the late first century and early second century AH, in order to understand the relationship between reality and Mu’tazilite thought in its multiple dimensions. The first chapter deals with the relationship between knowledge and linguistic meaning among the Mu’tazilites and reveals the effect of Mu’tazilite religious thought in formulating language between the types of semantic meaning and making it the last of these types. The conditions set by the Mu’tazilites for the validity of linguistic meaning were a natural introduction to discussing the concept of metaphor among the Mu’tazilites. It was necessary to point out the historical development of the concept of transition in meaning since the early stages of the emergence of the science of Interpretation, and clarifying the relationship between the maturity of rhetorical concepts in general, and the interpretation of the Qur’anic text to serve doctrinal differences between different sects, but this relationship between metaphor and interpretation needed a special chapter, the third chapter, to reveal this relationship more deeply on both the cognitive and religious levels. The study relied mainly on the comparison between the Mu’tazila and the Ash’ari in particular, a comparison that aims to deeply reveal the specificity of Mu’tazila thought without going beyond that to clarifying the intellectual origins of the Ash’aris, and the author’s goal is that through his study he has succeeded in revealing an important aspect of the Islamic religious heritage in the field of critical and rhetorical research.