Mur~d or ‘speaker meaning’, which is (or should be) the goal of effort to understand and interpret t

Mur~d or ‘speaker meaning’, which is (or should be) the goal of effort to understand and interpret the Qur’an. This concept is central to Ibn Taymiyya’s account of the rela¬tion¬¬ship between words and meaning in language generally, and specifically in the texts of Qur’an and ˆad‚th. Speaker meaning is different from ‘sentence meaning’, i.e. from words understood without reference to what their speaker intended: this is an approach suitable for purely literary (or otherwise professionally technical) texts, but not for the Qur’an (or perhaps any other Scripture). Sentence meaning is distinct from ‘word meaning’, i.e. words understood on their own, separately from any relation with context. Ibn Taymiyya holds that meaning does not inhere in words; rather, it is something that emerges from the connection, in a specific context and situation, between speaker and hearer. He treats words on their own as a special instance of context, which it is useful to reflect on because it enables us to focus more easily on what differentiates one usage from another. Otherwise, he does not accept that words have a ‘proper’ or ‘true’ literal meaning; even if they did, such meaning would have no claim to authority that can override mur~d. He sharply critiques two techniques for by-passing the speaker meaning of the Qur’an: ta|w‚l or interpretation of the sort that, with different excuses, moves away from the directly available sense of the words; and tafw‚d or surrender (i.e., to God) of the effort to understand certain expressions in the Qur’an with the excuse that no-one, not even the Prophet, knows or can know their meaning.
Our ability to understand the speaker meaning of the Qur’an is affected by its being divine speech. However, since the vehicle of that speech is a human language, our ability to understand it is also subject to the conditions that apply in inter-human speech. Among these conditions is a requirement that the hearer must have some initial grasp of what the speaker is talking about, some way of ‘connecting with’ or ‘recognising’ something in the speech with which the effort of understanding can begin, and some sort of stake which motivates the will to understand the speaker. Ibn Taymiyya holds that the fira makes up the initial ‘human competence’ which allows the effort to understand God’s speech to begin. The fira contains the basic presuppositions or axioms of reason; the basic faculties for processing sense impressions; for language acquisition; for differ¬en¬tiating harmful and beneficial; for distinguishing impulses and behaviour as disap¬proved and approved; a strong awareness of dependency on God; and, as Ibn Taymiyya emphasises, a love of God, manifested in a feeling of responsibility or care and a desire to find or be near Him. The fira in itself contains no more than an intimation of God and that which is due to Him by way of gratitude, obedience, love. This cannot really be called knowing God. Rather, it is analogous to being on a hill inland and hearing the cry of a sea-gull, or catching on the air some smell that brings to mind the sea: these intimations can make us turn in one direction (towards the sea) rather than another; but they do not constitute a travelling in that direction, still less any arrival, any sighting or knowledge of the sea. The direction of travel (see nubuwwa) is assured by signs that strengthen the first intimation (sea-smell is stronger, sea-spray on the air, etc.), or the opposite. The fira is highly vulnerable to alteration, depending on the nurture it finds. However, it can never be annulled altogether (in the way that, for example, the faculties of sight or language acquisition can altogether atrophy if the eye is not exposed to light or the ear is not sufficiently exposed to human language). The condition of the fira, when it is impeded, may be likened to the distress and fear of a lost infant, unable to identify its parents in a crowd of people. When unimpeded, the fira can develop into an explicit searching for God as reported of Ibr~h‚m, `alayhi al-sal~m.