Elm (علم), A Science Of Pure Application (part 3)

Universes Of Discourse

....But again, the proof is in the pudding (one more way of saying that knowledge rests in application). One might think that a word simply means what it means—why enquire further? And we reply that, besides the universe of discourse, let’s say, in which the particular word is found (example), there’s a universe of discourse that’s exclusive to the word; in which the word is the center. The meaning obtained here of the word is much richer and more dynamic, and it’s this construct that we’re putting together when we’re trying to understand a particular word. Take a word like Quran—a word though meaningful in itself, most would think; it’s an adjective form of the verb form ‘Read’ (Iqra’), therefore, the Quran means ‘that which is to be read or recited.’ Which is true, but as it turns out, that’s merely one of many layers of meaning. The first thing that strikes us is the morphology of the word, the many forms and derivatives of the word. Besides Iqra, we find uses that have nothing to do with ‘reading’ in the familiar sense: قرار, قرية, قرة عين.

"We settle whatever ˹embryo˺ We will in the womb for an appointed term.

"وَنُقِرُّ فِى ٱلْأَرْحَامِ مَا نَشَآءُ إِلَىٰٓ أَجَلٍۢ مُّسَمًّۭى (Quran 22:5)

"We have never destroyed a society without a destined term.

"وَمَآ أَهْلَكْنَا مِن قَرْيَةٍ إِلَّا وَلَهَا كِتَابٌۭ مَّعْلُومٌۭ (Quran 15:4)

"No soul can imagine what delights are kept in store for them as a reward for what they used to do.

"فَلَا تَعْلَمُ نَفْسٌۭ مَّآ أُخْفِىَ لَهُم مِّن قُرَّةِ أَعْيُنٍۢ جَزَآءًۢ بِمَا كَانُوا۟ يَعْمَلُونَ (Quran 32:17)

"When you recite the Quran, seek refuge with Allah from Satan, the accursed.

"فَإِذَا قَرَأْتَ ٱلْقُرْءَانَ فَٱسْتَعِذْ بِٱللَّهِ مِنَ ٱلشَّيْطَـٰنِ ٱلرَّجِيمِ (Quran 16:98)

The word occurs in embryology (or reproduction) to denote the act of ‘settling’ or deciding what settles (or reposes) into the womb, implying a sense of probability as to what could have otherwise occupied the womb. The act of settling (Nqr) gives the final verdict, to the exclusion of everything else. It’s also used to mean ‘town’ or ‘community’ (Qarya), to many people’s surprise. A lot of people may object to the connection between Quran or Iqra and Qarya, but it’s quite clear that the same inflectional pattern or morphological formula is being followed. Now it’s convenient that for the embryological form, translated as ‘settle,’ we find an equivalent form ‘settlement,’ synonymous with ‘town’ or ‘village’; in fact, the term Qarya extends to all sedentary forms of human settlement.

Looking closer, we find that there are conditions that need to be met before a settlement could be eligible for the term Qarya, Quranically speaking, that is. It needs to be a society (Toynbee’s definition), a complex entity of interconnected, interdependent individuals among whom preside transactional relations, trade, education, politics, etc., as verse 259 of Surat Al-Baqarah relays:

"And [We brought him to a village] whose houses had fallen into utter ruin.

"قَرْيَةٍۢ وَهِىَ خَاوِيَةٌ عَلَىٰ عُرُوشِهَا (Quran 2:259)

Here, ‘Aroosh’—the plural of Arsh—stands for ‘throne.’ And throne here, as we’ve explained before, simply means the economy, the engine that runs the society, around which and for the sake of which governing systems are built, for it’s this that enables the society to be transactional, and by extension, the existence of society, i.e., for people to want to depend on each other.

"Society is the total network of relations between human beings. The components of society are thus not human beings but relations between them. In a social structure, individuals are merely the foci in the network of relationships. Members of society or of one or another of its component institutions (e.g., a club, a church, a class, a family, a ‘corporation’). A visible and palpable collection of people is not a society; it is a crowd. A crowd, unlike a society, can be assembled, dispersed, photographed, or massacred."(A Study of History, p. 1, p. 43, abridged)

Thus, Arsh, when pluralized into Aroosh عُرُوشِ, comes to mean the ‘industries’ which form the economy. Arsh falls very closely within the universe of discourse of the word Qarya قَرْيَةٍۢ. Another word is Qarar; this form appears in a cosmological context, which, consistent with the previous contexts, refers to the earth in one instance and to the hereafter in another, as a place of settlement. This is significant, especially in relation to the belief that humans may one day leave the earth for Mars or any other planet. Qarara قَرَارِ  here eliminates this possibility, for Qararan means ‘settlement for real,’ as in, to the avail of no other alternative. Humans will only live and die on earth and will only live eternally in the hereafter:

"O my people! This worldly life is only ˹a fleeting˺ enjoyment, whereas the Hereafter is truly the home of settlement.

"يَـٰقَوْمِ إِنَّمَا هَـٰذِهِ ٱلْحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنْيَا مَتَـٰعٌۭ وَإِنَّ ٱلْـَٔاخِرَةَ هِىَ دَارُ ٱلْقَرَارِ (Quran 40:39)

The last inflection is the expression Qurrat ‘Ayn قُرَّتُ عَيْنٍۢ which means ‘the true object of desire,’ that which is yearned for, that which is all that a person could ask for. Take the example of Pharaoh's wife, who said of Moses, then a baby whom they found by the riverbank, Qurrat ‘Ayn, here implying that it’s exactly what they’d been wanting, herself and Pharaoh:

"And Pharaoh’s wife said, ‘[He will be] a comfort of the eye for me and for you. Do not kill him; perhaps he may benefit us, or we may adopt him as a son.’ And they perceived not."

وَقَالَتِ ٱمْرَأَتُ فِرْعَوْنَ قُرَّتُ عَيْنٍۢ لِّى وَلَكَ ۖ لَا تَقْتُلُوهُ عَسَىٰٓ أَن يَنفَعَنَآ أَوْ نَتَّخِذَهُۥ وَلَدًۭا وَهُمْ لَا يَشْعُرُونَ (Quran 28:9)

Now, if we inquire as to what these various uses of the word have in common, the answer would be obvious; whether in the reproductive context, the cosmological, or the social sense, the word has this sense of ‘permanence’—the kind of permanence that follows a period of flux or change. The embryo is defined in the womb, the earth is our ground only because it’s opposed to the Sama السماء, the world of change and flux; the earth is the place where things are realized. Thus God uses the expression Yaleg يلج, which means ‘hypostatize’ or ‘materialize,’ to describe how things come to be on the earth, as opposed to the expression Ya’ruj يعرج, describing the opposite—how things come to alter and change form; in other words, the relation between universality and particularity.

The Sama is the realm of form or change, of flow, of continuity; the earth is the realm of discreteness, of shape, of definition. Thus in the rhythm of coming to be and passing into the possibility to be, we can identify Ya’ruj يعرج as the expression of ‘passage into change,’ whereas discreteness or definition is the realm of states, of definite modes of being. Thus, we can think of Yaleg  يلج as those states where definition has taken shape, or materialized, and Ya’ruj as those instances in which the shape changes, where something acquires a variable form, perhaps its capacity to become a part of a genus, or gain universality. This is the definite entering into the realm of continuity, i.e., Ya’ruj  يعرج.

It’s in relation to this that the concept of Quran and its various inflections can be made sense of. Qarar is the permanence that something gains after having been in flux; it’s this gaining of a specific and final form. Itself being in flux expresses its tendency towards a certain predefined state; we see this with Pharaoh’s wife—how she’d yearned for a child; this yearning is analogous to the flux that precedes concreteness or realization, and how from infertility the womb comes to host an embryo.

Thus, when we speak of the term Quran as an adjective for the expression ‘Read,’ we’re referring to the very personification of the object of ‘reading,’ that is, if there’s such a thing as the epitome of ‘readership’—a book that satisfies the archetype for reading, that’s to reading what moisture is to dryness, what north is to south—then we find this in the Quran, because, in this concept is contained a cosmological component derived from the various contexts of use that justifies this look. This is particularly relevant to the remark we made earlier about how the exodus from the humanities towards the natural sciences is ‘an implication of the search for a field in which our faculties could be allowed to roam free and unhinged.’ The terms ‘free and unhinged’ presuppose what we called the ‘very personification and ultimate object of reading,’ for if such an impulse exists, then there must be, as Borges put it in The Library of Babel, “a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books.”

This epitomic expression of an object of ‘reading,’ or the archetype of reading, i.e., the book, is precisely what the word Quran points to.

Now, the letter Nun نون we see at the end of the word Quran القران is important. As a suffix, it denotes this sense of ‘gaining of concreteness or materiality following the flux of being in different morphological forms.’ The addition of Nun adds ‘being’ to the concept, finally uniting all the different morphological forms under one compact universe of discourse. This concludes what we meant by these letters having fundamental logical utility; for Nun here serves the same function as what’s called universal quantification.

Universal Quantification

For all x (where x is the concept of Iqra/reading) p(x) is true, where p(x) is the same concept constituting a universe of discourse, i.e., a whole concept.