Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

302 Paul-A. Hardy
from mental operations performed upon this shared ontological content.
However, here is the key to our mystery.
The possibility of performing such mental operations is what allows
Ghazalı to maintain the two apparently incompatible claims: that figural
meaning is asymmetrically dependent on literal meaning and that
ultimately there are no literal truths to be told. The mental operations
are the contents of specific speech-acts. One may then sum up Ghazalı’s
epistemology of divine discourse in two moments. In the first, he gives a
logical account of the possible meanings of the sentences of the Qur’an,
explained as a function of the meanings of their verbal components
conceived as essences behind its words and their mode of combination
in inferential structures. Divine discourse will in this way be seen as
possessing a literal content linked with truth.
In the second moment, that literal content is placed at the disposal
of various non-direct speech-acts (isharat) to effect utterances of a nonliteral
significance and of a specific non-assertoric or rather illocutionary
force. Isharat are speech-acts performed with qur’anic sentences that
already have a literal meaning. Hence, the Sufi jihadist against French
colonialism, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’irı (1808–83) confessed, ‘‘Whenever
[God] wishes to communicate to me a command or give me good news,
warn me, communicate a piece of knowledge, or give me advice I have
sought touching on some matter, He informs me of what He wishes by
means of an ishara through a noble verse of the Qur’an.’’ 54
Using a qur’anic verse as an ishara therefore does not cancel out its
z _
ahir or surface meaning. From the perspective of the rational thinker,
for instance, a verse may have only legal import. At the same time, to
the saint, the significance of the same verse will be mystical and symbolic.
55 Here the figural meaning and indeed, scriptural meaning in
general become a matter of perspective. And if we have not in the
phenomenon of ishara an exhaustive account of the tropes found in the
Qur’an, Ghazalı has at least outlined their structure from the standpoint
of theological understanding.
What was important for him to stress was that ‘‘cancelling out the
z _
ahir meaning’’ was not something he advocated. That was ‘‘the view of
the Bat _
inıya [i.e. the Isma‘ılı Shı‘a]’’ who have, as he asserts, ‘‘one blind
eye and look only at one of the two worlds and do not recognise the
parallel between the two nor understand its significance’’. But Ghazalı
equally condemned ‘‘a cancellation of the secrets (asrar) ... which strips
the z _
ahir meaning of its content’’, this being the path of literalists. 56
Only ‘‘those who bring the two together achieve perfection’’. Therefore,
he can still maintain that cognition of meaning in divine discourse is
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