Toward and Additional Understanding of the Prophetic Discourse

Abstract

mmThis article is an attempt to apply some modern methodologies to structuralist discourse and consider its religious dimensions particularly by means of an anthropological and contemplative approach. This is based on the understanding that the rulings and meanings derived by the jurisprudents and exegetes from religious texts in the past were subject to the exigencies of the historical moment upon the exegete and the reader, more than being the result of the literal meaning of the discourse and the intention of the message. The author argues that the evolution of society necessarily leads to the evolution of religious law and a change in understanding, particularly as hermeneutics teaches one that meaning is the product of the transmitter and receiver as much as it is the product of the text, and that what is gained from the text is the result of a complex process between text, reader, and source and that its inferred meanings may often be responses to questions of the age that faces them. According to this vision, two models for prophetic discourse are here explored: the prophetic Hadith, and the divine Hadith. They both recur in the classical sources, where they bear fewer, or different, meanings than those we researched in this paper.