Fādil Al-Samarra’ī’s Contribution to Literary and Rhetorical Exegesis of the Qur’an

Abdul-Samad Abdullah

doi:10.3390/rel13020180

Abstract

This article explores and assesses Fādil al-Samarrā’ī’s contribution to literary and rhetorical Qur’anic exegesis, especially regarding the rhetorical inimitability of the Qur’an. The article looks at how al-Samarrā’ī approaches the Qur’anic text to reveal its miraculous expressional secrets and its rhetorical inimitability with mere Arabic linguistic tools while giving contexts high priority in his analyses and interpretations. Al-Samarrā’ī was able to reach the semantics and purposes of the Qur’an based on the Qur’anic language itself, relying on its sentence structure and order, as well as on the structures, significance, and special meanings of words (which distinguish them from their synonyms), and how all of it relates to the purposes and objectives of the Qur’an. Al-Samarrā’ī sought to use morphology, semantics, and syntax to reach the purposes of the Holy Qur’an and discover its miraculous and inimitable eloquence. To achieve this, al-Samarrā’ī relied on the rich and vast literature on the subject. Guided by the intellectual language and empirical questions of his time, his tremendous effort and contribution to the literature has helped to demystify this complex subject.

Highlights

Abū Muhammad Fādil bin Saleh bin Mahdi bin Khalil Al-Badri was part of the “AlBadri” clan, one of the Samarrā clans. He was born in Samarrā in 1933 AD to a middle-class family with high social and religious status
Al-Samarrā’ıdiscusses the limits of exploring the linguistic, literary, and rhetorical aspects of the inimitability of the Qur’an in the following passage: We are demonstrating some of the elements of art and beauty in this high artistic expression, and we are putting our hands on some of the transcendences of this expression, and we show that this expression cannot be matched by human being, even not by all human beings
As for the matter of miraculous inimitability, it is far from the mark! For it is greater than all that we say, more eloquent than all that we describe, and more amazing than all that we stand upon of the reasons for wonder

Summary

Fādil Al-Samarrā’ı

Abū Muhammad Fādil bin Saleh bin Mahdi bin Khalil Al-Badri was part of the “AlBadri” clan, one of the Samarrā clans. Al-Samarrā’ıcompleted his primary, intermediate, and secondary education in Samarrā, moved to Baghdad, where he studied to become a teacher He excelled in all his courses and graduated in 1953. Al-Samarrā’ıobtained a (Bachelor’s) degree, with distinction, and returned to teaching in a secondary school He enrolled in a postgraduate scheme that was established for the first time in Iraq to offer master’s degrees in the department of linguistics. He was appointed as a teaching assistant in the Department of Arabic Language at the College of Education at the University of Baghdad. He received his PhD in 1968 from Ain Shams.

Research Context

Conclusions