*(For the previous essay: 'Our Principles for Reading the Quran-1: Epistemic Principles'.)

In the previous essay we set forth the 5 epistemic principles we deem necessary for broad benefit in Quranic reading and for being able to hear how the Quran reads things and events. In this essay we set forth the 4 hermeneutic principles by which, when analysing the Quranic text, we hope to be led to the intended divine meaning (murād al-subḥānī).

Before turning to the principles, it helps to define a few terms. We will at times use the word text — by which we mean writings at every scale: a single letter, a word, a phrase, a verse, a cluster of verses, a sūrah, and the whole of the Quran.

By context we mean the background information that constitutes a text's meaning — strong enough to alter it from one extreme to the other. The principles for establishing these contexts are this essay's main subject.

The duality between meaning and the form that represents it is one of the most fundamental dualities in creation and being. Many dual pairs — semantics-syntax, spirit-matter, malakūt-mulk, soul-body, and even Quran-Cosmos — in fact arise from the same ontic root.

What turns an observation (syntax) into meaning (semantics) is context. This holds for reading human behaviour, for reading the events of nature, for reading the verses of the Quran. Yet context is sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit.

Say we observe a person with both hands held at his belt. Its meaning depends on context. In a mosque he is praying; in a state office, it is a mark of respect to a high official; while walking among trees, it is something else again.

Another illustration — say we see delicious apples this year on a tree we planted in our garden last year. When we take al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm into context, this event of shapes and observations yields gratitude as feeling and as meaning — a desire to draw nearer to the One who values a human who is in essence nothing, and to become the disciple of His will.

(Bismi'llāhi'r-Raḥmāni'r-Raḥīm is one such context; bismi rabbika al-ladhī khalaq is another.)

When reading the verses of the Quran too, establishing the right context is needed to reach the intended divine meanings. The four kinds of context we have established and generalized are:

1. Textual location: what precedes, follows, the parts, and the whole. Generalizes siyāq by adding the part-whole relation.
2. Vectoriality of the message: from where to where the message takes the person and the society. Generalizes asbāb al-nuzūl by foregrounding the verses' transformative functions.
3. The semantic-structural relational web: verses of similar meaning and verses that use words from the same root. Generalizes semantic similarities by including structural similarities.
4. The need that arises through murāqaba and muḥāsaba: the inner-need that issues from observing and evaluating one's inner state. Sets forth a new category of context by attending to the map of the emerald hills of the heart.

The most widely known and the strongest contributor to meaning is the other texts that come before and after — what is called sibāq and siyāq. But since we have accepted the precision principle for the Quran among our epistemic principles, we take this one step further and add two more dimensions: the meaning of the smaller texts that compose the text, and the meaning of the larger text within which it sits.

We call these the part-whole context and, together with sibāq-siyāq, the text's surrounding.

The part-whole context arises through a multi-scale relation. When the parts come together they give meaning to the whole; and the whole, in turn, adjusts and fine-tunes the meanings of its parts.

The atoms of written language — its smallest indivisible elementary particles — are the symbols we call letters. While in naḥw (Arabic grammar) a letter is defined as 'that which has no meaning of its own and requires other letters for meaning', each letter in fact points to a wide region on the map of meaning. Imagine a map of the world of meaning; each letter points to a country on it.

Tracing the alphabet's history we find its origin in the Phoenician alphabet, which itself transformed from hieroglyphic symbols representing outer-world objects; each symbol had its own name and meaning.

The Arabic letter ع, for example, has as its origin the eye hieroglyph rendered as ʿayin in Phoenician. The Latin O, the Greek Omicron. In modern Arabic the letter is still pronounced عين (ʿayn) and means eye. In Greek too, ophthalmos — ὄψ (ops — eye) + θάλαμος (thalamos — chamber) — is written with omicron.

Another example is the letter ف (fā). Its origin in hieroglyph is the symbol of the mouth; it is cognate with the Latin p. In Arabic, mouth is فم (fam). A great share of words beginning with fā neighbour the meanings of opening, expansion, going forth: fatḥ (opening), fajr (the dawn's emergence), fataṭa (cleaving forth), fisq (the mouse's head emerging from the hole), and so on.

Indeed, و sets two expressions side by side; with ف, the latter emerges from within the former — building a new meaning upon the meaning of the previous.

When these symbols (letters) join other symbols they point to a region slightly narrower on the map of meaning — yet still wider than everyday usage. In Turkish we call these packets words (kelime).

Words combined with other words form phrases: a semantic narrowing, meaning becomes more distinct (a city). Phrases combined with other elements form sentences (a neighbourhood). Sentences combined into paragraphs (a site); paragraphs into chapters (a building); chapters into a book — meanings becoming ever more distinct.

When examining a verse, then — by attending to the etymological and semantic meanings of the words composing it, the structural ordering preferred (e.g. nominal vs verbal sentence), the topic that precedes it, the topic to follow, the overall colour and message of the sūrah within which it sits, and at times even the messages of the preceding and following sūrahs — the 'text's surrounding' context has been established.

Among the categories of context is also the vectorial reading of the Quran. Let us first explain this strange phrase at the surface, then more deeply.

The verses of the Wise Quran form a holistic book, and they fit perfectly to the location they occupy within it (mawāqiʿ al-nujūm). In al-Fātiḥa we ask ihdinā al-ṣirāṭa al-mustaqīm — guide us to the straight path; and immediately after, at the opening of al-Baqara, we receive the reply hudan li-l-muttaqīn — guidance for the God-conscious.

Even so, the noble verses descended piece by piece across 23 years, fitted to the states, conduct, and social events of the Messenger and his noble companions. Thereby, the All-Wise contextualized His verses with the conditions of their revelation — and expounded them first to His honoured Prophet, then to the companions, and through the hadith corpus to us. In the literature, the conditions surrounding the verses' descent are called asbāb al-nuzūl.

When the method of asbāb al-nuzūl is misunderstood, one risks trapping the Quran in a historicist gaze, reducing it to a historical document with no bearing on present persons and societies. Alternatively, one risks rejecting asbāb al-nuzūl wholesale and missing the divine intent.

The most consistent and upright approach we know is what we call vectorial reading.

A vector is an abstract mathematical object with direction and magnitude between two points. It also carries a sense of bearing. In reading the asbāb al-nuzūl, we take not a single point but two: the conditions just before the message as the start, the changed conditions after it as the head — and we infer the direction in which the message transformed person and community.

With this inference in hand, we aim to apply the verses to our own personal and social conditions of today.

The biological evolution of the human, the evolution of the stars, the ceaseless expansion of the cosmos, the continual increase of entropy — that is, of information — the absence of stillness in the cosmos: just as these speak of the dynamism of the verses of the Cosmic Book, so too the dynamism of its dual, the Quranic Book, is hidden in the same secret.

The Quran's central dynamism — concepts like fī sabīlillāh and ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, taraqqī and takāmul (ascent and perfection), tawba, awba, ināba (turning, returning, repenting) — these are signs that foreground the evolution of person and society through the means of will and knowledge.

In Islam, even the act most emphasized — prayer — is both in meaning (Sūrah Al-Qiyāma 75:31-32) and physically a turning, a miʿrāj, a journey.

These observations grant us a principle of reading existence and reality not on the basis of objects but on processes — especially on the basis of generative, righteous (ṣāliḥ) process.

One arm of this is to accept that the Miraculously Eloquent Quran is not a static decree delivered 14 centuries ago, but a transformative function whose target is to change person and society toward a state drawn out for them.

That the asbāb al-nuzūl — the events that appear as occasions for the verses' descent — should be considered in interpretation is only a small arm of this general principle, used here and there from the companions down to today.

But to generalize this approach systematically — to read asbāb al-nuzūl as a psychological and sociological general state and frame, and to take the meanings and conditions that the persons and events of that era represent as essential — is required. For just as the Pharaoh facing Mūsā (peace be upon him) in fact denotes Pharaonism against the true message, and the Satan facing Adam denotes Satanity facing humanity — so too a verse descended upon a word of Abū Jahl carries a transformative message against the Abū-Jahl state that recurs throughout history, perhaps present in the nafs of every human.

This reading tells us that there is, in truth, no abrogated (mansūkh) verse — no verse whose ruling has been lifted. For the verses have carried person and society from one place to another, and the person needs that carrying at every station; the society needs it in every age.

Accepting the vectoriality of the message, we can infer both that the indicative messages (ishārī) of the verses said to be abrogated continue, and that with changed and specialized conditions, their explicit rulings too may again become applicable.

In the Quran, clusters of verses take up certain topics. Though these clusters appear in different locations, they are interrelated. So much so that drawing lines among related clusters yields a network. Each node of this network is a cluster that corresponds to a meaning.

Because the verses are interrelated, the exposition of a matter may sometimes be answered through a chain of verses across different locations. Sometimes what is summarized briefly in one place is unfolded in detail elsewhere (taṣrīf). At other times, structural templates, by the meaning they have gained in other locations' contexts, unfold (tafṣīl) the passage we are reading.

Which related verse-clusters take priority in context depends on the question we put to the Quran and on the difficulty we face. Bediüzzaman describes this context thus:

Here semantic relation is used far more — but structural relation, that is, attending to other verses that use the same word-roots, phrases, and narrative templates, is most often missed. An example:

The word raghadan — including the words derived from its root — appears in only 3 verses in the Quran. These 3 verses tell wholly different scenes. Yet they are structurally very similar.

All three verses turn around a place (a town, the garden, a town) and provision. In all three, the matter is the same: at a place of limitless provision, ingratitude over what one has done, and the descent of distress and harm that follows.

When any of these is taken as the centre, the others clarify the position of that centre in the space of meaning.

Just as in the opening of the meaning of the Quranic verses to the mind, the contexts of location, vectoriality, and inter-verse relation matter — so too in the searing of a verse's transformative light into the heart, the context of the person's state is decisive.

A verse may give one message to a person in one state, another message in another. This rests on the verses being the keys to spiritual treasures and on the divine aḥadī manifestation.

Say a heavy responsibility has been laid on you. When you read Sūrah Al-Muzzammil in that state, you see it offer night-worship as a prescription:

There are many such examples. Because this matter is bound to a person's inner states — and because inner states are not clearly characterized or grasped by everyone — we think the works written on this subject have remained somewhat in the background of people's attention.

For this reason, when reading the Quran we must absolutely review our inner state, monitor it, and maintain a continual muḥāsaba (self-accounting) of its advance or decline.

Yet when looking at our inner states, not a coarse murāqaba-muḥāsaba of mere 'good state — bad state' — but taking up the map of the emerald hills of the heart, with a high-resolution murāqaba and muḥāsaba, we should ask of God that the verses become life to our life.

No single letter, word, verse, ʿushr, or sūrah of the Quran — nor even the Quran itself, taken alone — represents the whole of the meaning.

We must take into account the verses' before-after-parts-whole, the state from which they took the companions and the state to which they brought them, the verses with which they are related, and our awareness of what we need.

A naïve approach produces many candidate contexts. Among these, systematic weighting and ordering by importance is possible. Our preference is the algorithmic doing of this with technology — an objective algorithmic context analysis in place of ad hoc personal decisions.

For words and concepts used very rarely — at times only once — recourse must also be had to their uses outside the Quran and in the tradition, as the normal weighting would be low.

By establishing epistemic and hermeneutic principles, we have personally seen that these small Quran-readings with our friends have clarified our gaze upon our inner world, our social relations, and matters of science — and we more deeply wish that everyone re-enter the Quran's golden climate.

The purpose of sharing this essay and — God willing — the Quran-reading notes that will follow slowly is: to trigger, even modestly, the enthusiasm of reading the Quran and making it life to one's life in other places too. Success is from God.