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An Analysis of Majāzi and Haqīqi Meanings in Ilmu Dilālah: A Literature Study on Arabic Scholarly Texts

Summary

This is a qualitative literature study within ilmu dilālah, the Arabic science of meaning and signification. It examines how two classical categories of word meaning work in Arabic scholarly, religious and literary writing: haqīqi (literal, actual sense) and majāzi (figurative or metaphorical sense). The authors draw on books, journal articles and Arabic scholarly texts found through Google Scholar and JSTOR, and analyse them thematically. The abstract also mentions interviews with Arabic linguists and a survey, but the method section describes only the literature review. There is no corpus, annotation scheme or quantitative measure.

The main finding is that the two meaning types serve different purposes:

  • Majāzi carries emotional, aesthetic and abstract or spiritual content. It dominates in poetry and in passages about the divine.
  • Haqīqi supplies clarity and accountability. It is the better fit for legal, scientific and medical prose.

The authors argue that interpretation, especially tafsir and legal reasoning (istinbāṭ), needs a balance between the two. Reading too literally can strip a text of its historical and cultural context. The work matters mainly as a conceptual and pedagogical overview for Arabic teaching and interpretation.

Key points

  • The method is a qualitative literature study with thematic analysis, with sources gathered from Google Scholar and JSTOR. Methodological grounding comes from Creswell (2014) and Booth et al. (2016).
  • No dataset, counts or evaluation metrics are reported. The conclusions rest on illustrative examples.
  • The main examples are:
    • "hand of God" in the Qur'ān, read as power and authority rather than a body part;
    • the hadith "Religion is advice," which needs a figurative, broad reading;
    • "the sea of knowledge," which signals depth and breadth of learning.
  • The cited figures and works include Al-Jurjani, Al-Ghazali (figurative language for spiritual concepts), the Mu'allaqat, and Al-Mutanabbi's poetry (figurative language for love, loss and longing).
  • The paper claims a split by genre: literature leans majāzi, while law, science and medicine lean haqīqi. It also links the distinction to Hanafi legal methodology.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The literal reading is the default, and a figurative reading is adopted only when the literal one cannot hold, as with a divine "hand." This gives a principled trigger for metaphor instead of guessing. — For Mova (frames): When a VerbNet selectional restriction is violated by a frame filler, flag the role as figurative and record the violated constraint as the explanation.
  • I2. The expected balance of literal and figurative usage depends on genre: poetry tolerates more majāzi, while legal or medical text should be read literally. This lets an interpreter adjust its willingness to reinterpret based on what kind of text it is reading. — For Mova (world): Attach a genre/register flag to the world of the text that raises or lowers the threshold for accepting a figurative reading before entities and states are committed.
  • I3. A figurative expression often stands for one salient attribute of its source image, so "sea of knowledge" means vast and deep knowledge. Interpreting a metaphor then becomes mapping the image to a property, not to a whole object. — For Mova (world): Store image-to-attribute mappings (sea → large/deep, hand → power) in the compiled knowledge layer, so a figurative phrase becomes a measurable state on the entity rather than a fake object.
  • I4. The authors warn that rigidly literal readings lose context, while unchecked figurative readings risk distortion. Keeping both readings and choosing by context is safer than forcing one early. — For Mova (answer): For fables and tales, let readers hold both the literal and figurative interpretations as alternatives and justify which one answers the question, which keeps the moral-of-the-story questions explainable.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.38073/lughawiyyat.v8i1.2318

@inproceedings{saepudin2025analysis,
  title = {{An Analysis of Majāzi and Haqīqi Meanings in Ilmu Dilālah: A Literature Study on Arabic Scholarly Texts}},
  author = {saepudin, asep and Muizzudin, Moh and Nurhamim, Nurhamim},
  booktitle = {Lughawiyyat 8},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.38073/lughawiyyat.v8i1.2318},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.38073/lughawiyyat.v8i1.2318}
}

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