Aspects of Interpretation of Texts Among Islamic Fundamentalist Jurisprudents

Abstract

This paper explores those aspects of interpreting texts' meanings by Islamic Fundamentalist Jurisprudents (FJs, henceforth) who represent a special class of linguists. They are concerned with the investigation of aspects of meaning within religious texts so as to form legal interpretations and judgments. Herein the attempt is made to trace their own stream of thought in the study of linguistic clues, whether internal or external, in the treatment of texts and detecting the intended meaning therein. By so doing, a distribution of their views is made into frameworks of present day streams of linguistic thought. It has been concluded that the FJs not only looked at the semantic aspects in their interpretation of texts, but they were more concerned with the pragmatic aspects in their search for the appropriate legal judgments