Developing New Instrument For Quranic Understanding Among Diverse Group Of People

Abstract

This article was initiated to develop a new instrument in the understanding of Quran among a diverse group of people. Due to time and modernity, the study of Quran and its interpretation methods are evolved tremendously. There are many different approaches developed to assist Muslims and non-Muslims alike to understand the teachings of Quran. However, there are still those who are unable to grasp the teachings due to the unsuitability of the approaches. Thus, this study aimed to identify the factors that may contribute to the understanding of the Quran. This study involved 5000 respondents nationwide, which use a survey methods benefits from a self-develop and self-administered set of questionnaires. It reveals that comprehension, religious practice, belief, language literacy and learning style significantly contribute as factors for Quranic understanding. It is imperative in order to deliver an enhanced understanding of a diverse group of people in this modern age, especially among the multi-cultural society in Malaysia in particular and the general mass.

Keywords: Semantic analysissocio-linguistic analysissocial stratareligion; language

Introduction

Understanding reading text be it literary, scientific or religious texts requires content knowledge on the part of the readers. Reading the Holy Quran is unexceptional plus it is the primary source of reference for Muslims. Due to its importance, non-Muslims are also attracted to read and try to understand its contents. In order to understand the concepts, various methods of interpretation have been proposed by Muslim scholars. Apart from having the relevant content knowledge, literature has shown that there are other pertinent factors that contribute a person’s understanding. In the semantic analysis, six multi-relational of semantic components have yet to be applied. While in socio-linguistic, three fundamental variables have yet to be investigated. While the combination of these two approaches has not been extensively explored. Therefore, we propose a combination of these two approaches to create a new instrument to understand the contents of the Quran for a diverse group of people. Hence, this paper aims to identify the factors that contribute people’s understanding when reading the Quran. It is based on the findings, it is hoped that a new instrument to classify the people can be developed and suitable approaches for each group can be designed. In doing so, this study begs on two research questions as (1) how do the diverse group of people in a modern society classify? And (2) what is the contributing factors in understanding Quran among the diverse group of people?

Problem Statement

As Quran is the most important book that works as a source of reference for Muslims, it is vital that its contents are comprehensively studied and understood. The study to understand the contents of the Quran is not an easy feat, be it for the believers, what more the non-believers. Efforts have been made by companions of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and Muslim scholars to interpret the Quran for the people to comprehend its contents (Pakeeza & Chishti, 2012). They have industriously worked on methods to interpret the contents of the Quran. It requires special knowledge and superb language abilities. Each word and each letter in the Quran has their own faces of meaning and interpretation (Al-Nursi, 1995). Thus, it is important to understand them in order to design certain tafsir that could be acceptable for all, despite their knowledge and socio-cultural backgrounds. Two of the earliest prominent methodologies were the (1) Tafsir bi al-Ma’thur, (2) Tafsir bi al-Ra’yi. However, current Muslim scholars realize that there is a need to evolve in the way the interpretation is made in order to provide an understanding which is in line with the present new theories and disciplines of knowledge (Campanini, 2011). Further, Amin Ahsan Islahi suggest that there are different types of Quranic exegesis: traditionalist, theological, literary- philosophical and juridical (Pakeeza & Chishti, 2012). The interpretation of Holy Quran has to be pragmatic and modern in its approach while at the same time steadfastly embracing the Islamic turath. In the modern era, Muslim scholars have begun to offer new approaches to redefining the understanding of Quran in the light of modernity. Their efforts evidenced in numerous methodologies such as thematic approach (Muhammad, 2001; Shatnawi, 2010), comparative approach (Al-‘Ak, 1994; Al-Dzahabiy, 2000), tahlili approach (Shatnawi, 2010), and ilmiy approach (Muslim, 2005; Zayid, 2008) among others. For example, Campanini (2011) realizes that in the modern age, the interpretation of Holy Quran has to be pragmatic or practical in its approach. This is to ensure that the teachings of Islam and the contents of the Quran could reach a bigger and more diverse group of people. Thus, he took the liberty by exploring early methodologies to the understanding of the Qur’an in order to offer an appropriate manual to Muslims on how to read the Qur’an. These new scholarly methodologies to the Qur'an have led to an increasing appreciation for the numerous of ways in which the Qur'an has been established and deduced by Muslims. This is significant especially for contemporary Muslim in understandings of the text.

The sociolinguistic approach is among the new approaches that have been explored and used. Socio linguistic is particularly overwhelmed with the determinants of the construct that promote and mapping of these onto the language itself and the generalisability such phenomena (Holt, 2006) which includes differences of regional, class, occupational dialect, gender, and bilingualism. It has been applied on Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism scriptures and Quran and Hadith. However, studies using the socio-linguistic approach have only focused on incorporating between religious text, scientific findings, logical approaches to enhancing the understanding of Quran (Al-Nursi, 1995) while some others focused on the diversity of the Al Qur’an to the meaning with social norms that exist in the language of the user community (Ruslan, 2014). Furthermore, previous studies did not focus three fundamental sociolinguistic attributes, which are (1) social attributes, (2) social factors and (3) group of people. By focusing on these three primary sociolinguistic attributes, researchers would be able to provide a more comprehensive method/way of interpreting the contents of the al-Quran.

Apart from the sociolinguistic approach, the linguistic approach is equally important. The semantic analysis focuses on the study of meaning as an element of language and how it is constructed by language as well as interpreted, obscured and negotiated by speakers and listeners of language. The Recent semantic approach is more applied with computational analysis which called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which focuses on extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words. The approach has some limitations especially in terms of statistical computation, such as difficulty in differentiating fine-grained relations between lexical semantics, synonyms, antonyms, and hypernyms. Due to those limitations, various studies have been carried out to overcome these weaknesses of Latent Semantic Analysis by introducing Multi-Relational Latent Semantic Analysis using a synonym, antonym, and hypernym (Chang, Yih, & Meek, 2013) and it has since been used to extract and represent the contextual-usage meaning of words. However, an area that is under-explored is a combination of six relations, which are a synonym, polysemy, hypernym, hyponym, holonym, antonym in extracting the contextual-usage meaning of words from various data.

Research Questions

In doing so, this study begs on two research questions as

Purpose of the Study

Based on the brief literature, there exists a need and possibility to combine the semantic analysis and the sociolinguistic approach in order to create a new model for understanding the contents of the Quran. From a sociolinguistic point of view, there exists a new aspect that has not been explored in order to offer an improved understanding of Quran. It is using the three fundamental variables in understanding the religious text in a diverse group of people within a multi-cultural and multi-religion community. Age, education/knowledge background as suggested by Said Nursi and religions. Semantic analysis on the hand will help on analysis of the respondent point of view to differentiate the diverse meaning from right one using a combination of six multiple relations between words, which are a synonym, antonym, hypernym, hyponym, holonym, and meronym. This is an effort to offer an acceptable and practical interpretation of the Quran in afford of understanding of a diverse group of people in this modern age who are willing to know about Islam and to read Quran as Islamic theology text. Therefore, we propose a new model for understanding the content of Quran using a combination of semantic analysis and sociolinguistic approaches. But, in this specific article, we are verifying the validity and reliability of a new instrument for determining Quranic understanding among a diverse group of people.

Research Methods

Based on previous studies (Al-Nursi, 1995; Chang et al., 2013; Holt, 2006; Ruslan, 2014), five major dimensions were identified. The dimensions in focus were comprehension, religious practices, belief, language literacy and learning styles. Further sub-dimensions were identified. The researchers identified specific items representing each determined sub-dimension. Each sub-dimension was further elaborated with a minimum of 3 items. Because data later will be examine using Structural Equation Modeling, therefore minimum 3 items is considered sufficient or otherwise it should be regarded as unmeasured latent (Mohd Azmir Mohd Nizah, Ku Hasnita Ku Samsu, Muhammad Shamshinor Abdul Azzis, & Afi Roshezry Abu Bakar, 2017; Zainudin Awang, 2014). A reliability test was conducted to ensure that the items were acceptable for this research. The researchers applied Cronbach’s Alpha as the tool to measure the reliability of the items. Based on all the dimensions, sub-dimensions and items, a set of questionnaires consisting of 100 items was developed to identify factors that would affect or contribute or perhaps facilitate people’s understanding when reading the Quran. The detail of the dimensions and their sub-dimensions are presented in the table below:

Using multi stage clustered sampling technique, respondents comprising a minimum of 100 from each state in Peninsular Malaysia took part in the study. In total 5000 respondents answered the questionnaire.

Findings

The result shows that most of the sub-dimensions along with their items are above the minimum requirement for alpha values of 0.70 (Pallant, 2011). However, there are several sub-dimensions are removed because of the reliability test result shows below the minimum of 0.70. The following tables encapsulate all the Cronbach’s Alpha’s result for the accepted sub-dimensions descriptively.

Conclusion

This study aimed at understanding the factors that may contribute to the understanding of the Quran among diverse groups of people. Based on descriptive analysis on the factors above, it can be concluded that comprehension, religious practice, belief, language literacy and learning styles domains may contribute to the understanding Quran among diverse groups of people. To answer the question of what contributes towards the understanding of the Quran, it is statistically significant that comprehension, religious practice, belief, language literacy and learning style domains contribute to al-Quran understanding. Thus, with the ability to classify diverse of groups of people, it is believed that a more suitable approach to understanding the Quran can be designed to suit specific groups of people.

Acknowledgments

This research work is supported by the Transdisciplinary Research Grant Scheme (TRGS) sponsored by Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia coded USIM/TRGS02_PROJEK02/ISI/59/50516.

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