Al- majāz in the Qur’an: Classification, Semantic Function, and Its Implications for Qur’anic Interpretation

Abstract

This article examines al-majāz in the Qur’an as a structured rhetorical-semantic mechanism that plays a central role in Qur’anic interpretation. The study addresses a conceptual, methodological, and interpretive problem in existing scholarship: Qur’anic figurative language is often treated either as a decorative aspect of balāghah or as a broad category of nonliteral expression without sufficient classification and textual control. Using a qualitative textual-hermeneutical design, the article analyzes selected Qur’anic passages through close reading, classical Arabic rhetorical classification, semantic analysis, and hermeneutical interpretation. The study focuses on how majāz can be classified through categories such as majāz lughawī, majāz ʿaqlī, majāz mursal, attributional transfer, part-whole relation, locality, causality, and contextual displacement. The findings show that majāz performs significant semantic functions in constructing Qur’anic concepts of guidance, misguidance, faith, disbelief, moral responsibility, divine-human relation, and eschatological consequence. Figurative expressions involving darkness and light, disease and the heart, opening and hardness, trade and loss, rootedness and instability demonstrate that majāz does not merely embellish Qur’anic discourse, but organizes theological and ethical meanings into coherent semantic fields. The article further argues that majāz functions as a hermeneutical control that mediates between rigid literalism and uncontrolled figurative interpretation. Its theoretical contribution lies in integrating classical balāghah, Qur’anic semantics, and contemporary hermeneutical theory into a systematic model for studying figurative Qur’anic language.