Homonymy in the Prophetic Traditions: A Study in Sahih Al-Bukhari and Moslim

Abstract

Studying homonymy in the Prophet’s traditions is considered very important since it deals with the relationship between the linguistic aspect and semantic one. It facilitates the understanding the meanings of words, and the texts of Prophet’s traditions. Understanding the Prophet’s traditions, which include words of more than one meaning, depends on understanding the significances of such words in the Arabic. So, significance of the text should be taken into consideration in order to understand those words mentioned in the Prophet’s traditions. If the clues that help us to understand the text are not available, then the meanings of that homonymous should be considered, if not, one of the meanings will be against other ones without any evidence. We collected many homonymous words from Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sahih Moslim. The homonymy in these words may be used by the Arab linguists or by the Holy Koran and Sunna. Also, we explained their meanings in the Prophet’s traditions in which they were mentioned according to the contexts and cotext of the text.