Multiple layers of meaning and allegory or literal
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Salam All,
I would like to talk to all and get some feedback about this idea... I believe it will help push the miracle/symbolism interpretation debate ahead somewhat. While arguing here and there in the various threads running on this forum about whether the "miracle" verses are allegorical or literal, I realized that I had trouble passing the simple idea that a verse in the text could carry several meanings all of which can be true. If one meaning is proven correct, the other meaning, or meanings, need not necessarily be false. I would like to make this clear by means of what I believe to be a great and clear example of multi layered meaning in the Quran.
Before the multi-layer stuff, I'd like to say something about the debate itself. I posted a few times here and there arguing, mainly with Brother Joe, that the metamorphosis of a stick into a snake is not all that crazy phenomena and that we could possibly discover someday laws that could account for it. Brother Joe's position is If you cannot prove it, forget it, or else you risk being a blind-faith believer. I concluded my debate, kind of, by simply accepting "blind-faith" as a label to describe my faith. I seriously do not see any problem with that, I also claimed that all scientists in the history if mankind carry but the same kind of belief, but's another issue. What I'd like to add is that I personally believe the literal interpretation to be scientifically superior to the allegorical one, for the simple reason that in fact the first one could in principle be verified by science, while the second one can never be, for Moral is not in the domain of science to begin with, but I still do not reject the allegorical meanings in principal.
There is a wonderful article out there in the web about consistency or coherence in the Quran where I first read what is going to follow here, I googled a lot but could not find it... I will keep searching and post a URL once I find it.
There is a verse in the Quran that says "Do they not consider the Quran? Had it been from any other than Allah, they would surely have found therein much discrepancy." This verse has a meaning that everyone immediately sees, the Quran, it claims, has no discrepancies in it. If it did, then one could reject the fact that it is from God. the word "discrepancy" in the verse, in Arabic "ikhtilaf" is understood to refer to whatever meanings you'd find in a dictionary.
A second layer of meaning for the above verse takes the word "discrepancy" to mean "the word discrepancy", the word itself. this is called meta-language in linguistics, I believe, when language refers to itself. When one searches for the occurrences of the word "discrepancy" in the Quran, one finds only one such occurrence, in this verse itself. thus the second meaning becomes, "the word discrepancy in the Quran does not occur many times", for in fact it never occurs at all, besides this very occurrence.
Now, the meta-language meaning is true, and so is the first meaning. The verse could still be studied, and will be, and could be revealed to support additional layers of meaning. all of these extra meaning disturb in no way the first, straightforward, meaning of the verse.
To show that the above mathematical feature in the text is not random,someone searched for additional meta-language references in the text that could qualify, and sure enough he found many. In the Quran there are verses that say that something is equal or unequal to something else. like Jesus is like Adam, or those who know are unlike those who do not know. He, I believe the discovery was made by a Canadian Christian scholar, discovered that the pattern persists with an amazing consistency. when the verse says X is like Y and the number of occurrence of X is N then the number of occurrence of Y is also N. When the verse says X is unlike Y, then number of occurrence of X is N then the number of occurrence of Y is constantly N+1, except for one case, where the verse actually predicts the phenomenon and comments on it.
To get back to the "miracle" verses I would say that the literal interpretation is the first layer of meaning, the allegorical interpretation is another layer and there could yet be other layers. So we need not debate as if only when layer is possible.
I personally believe the literal meaning to be correct, despite that fact that science has not yet discovered any law that could account for them, but then again science does not have, as of yet, any laws that account, explain, the origin of life, complexity and organization, as in DNA and human mind and intelligence or creation of something out of nothing or why is there something rather than nothing and so on... things the Quran states as facts.
Peace,
Mohamed~