Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

296 Paul-A. Hardy
were revealed did not need to inquire about its shades of meaning;
for they were speakers of Arabic, and so could dispense with
inquiring about its shades of meaning and about whatever it
contains due to their immediate understanding of it. 28
For Ibn Taymiyya, this argues that Muslims originally had no recourse
to anything other than the very words God Himself uses in interpreting
the Qur’an. For with the utterance of words, in his view, goes also how
they are to be taken. No qur’anic utterance occurs without a specific
force. ‘‘There is no part of the Qur’an or the hadith,’’ he says, ‘‘that God
and His Messenger have not made clear to their hearers and readers in
such a way that they would require some other source of information to
clarify their meanings.’’ 29
Finally, ‘‘how can one know for certain that the words that the Arabs
were using to communicate with each other before and at the time of
the Qur’an’s revelation had not been used previously to convey different
meanings?’’ We cannot. Furthermore, if we are ‘‘not certain that such
words were not used differently at a previous time, then neither is it
possible to know whether they bear a literal meaning in conflict with
that upon which [people] have agreed’’. 30 The literal then may be a
metaphor whose original figural sense has simply been forgotten.
Certainly, many lexical items prove to be dead metaphors that were
alive and kicking at some time in the past. For an example, he observes
that ‘‘the word z _
a‘ına was originally used to refer to a ... camel for
riding, after which people came to apply the same word to the woman
who rides on the camel’s back in a litter’’. 31 Someone could use ‘‘z _
a‘ına’’
in a true sentence while his contemporaries continued to speak falsehoods
with the same words. 32 If this is so, then what we call figural
speech merely reflects a usage that is so far unfamiliar. We call ‘‘literal’’
those words we are able to handle based on our present and past
knowledge. What we call ‘‘figural’’ then simply reflects our perception of
what is unsuitable for use in any context we have known so far. 33 Once
this is granted, it seems difficult to maintain that there exists a specifically
figural as opposed to a literal meaning in divine discourse. But for
Ibn Taymiyya literal meaning is all the meaning there is.
the end of epistemology
Still, Ibn Taymiyya is himself not the most helpful guide for
unpacking how much can be fitted into his concept of al-kalam
al-musta‘mal, or ‘‘discourse in use’’, or for that matter into the notion of
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