A Pragmatic Analysis of Selected Qur’anic Verses Based on the Creation of Man

Abstract

Qur’an, the main source of the Islamic faith, is a book believed by its followers, the Muslims, to be completely of divine origin. The eloquence, depth, meaning, and beautiful language of this book surprised thinkers and critics world over. Even, non-Muslim scholars agree that the Qur’an is Arabic literature par excellence. Despite its Arabic origin, there are thousands of Muslims who do not possess the knowledge in Arabic and study the Qur’an in English. English speaking readers of the Qur’an have registered a dramatic increase in Qur’an related reading materials as a result of their close interaction with the West. Their interest in the Qur’an has resulted in the production of a plethora of works on the Qur’an in English. Therefore, this paper examined a pragmatic analysis of selected Qur’anic verses on the creation of man. Fifteen excerpts, adapted from Al-Muntada Al-Islami Trust (2012) translation of the Qur’an, where the processes of creation were explored were randomly selected. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate how meaning-relations are used to analyze passages and deduce linguistic mechanisms employed in divine texts. The data was subjected to perpetual analysis through the engagement of pragmatic concepts like speech act, implicature, presupposition, inference and context. The study reveals that the physical context of the data was in paradise and turns taken by Allah demonstrated the stance of supremacy.  Thus, linguistic engagement of divine texts is proposed to debar scholastic malapropisms and religious violence.

Keywords: Allah; Pragmatics; Searle; divine texts; Qur’an; speech act