RULES OF MEANING CLARIFICATION (AL BAYAN) IN AL RISALA OF IMAM AL-SHAFI’I: RULES OF THE TARGET OF BAYAN ALMOBAYYANAND UNDERSTANDING THE EVIDENCE

Abstract

This research aims to infer rules of calrifying the meanings of revelation (Bayan), as presented in (Al-risala) of Al-Shafi’i, explaining them briefly, and presenting the most important related issues. Al-Shafi’i’s opinions about Bayan are not found in a specific part in Al-risala, they are spread all over the book. These opinions are related to three Pillars: the interpreter (Almobayyen), the target of Al Bayan (Almobayyan), and the evidence of Al Bayan. Some of the rules of Bayan’s evidence are related to indicating the types of accepted evidence of Bayan, others are related to the ways of dealing with them, including ways of texts authentication, understanding, and dealing with what seem to be contradictions between the texts. By following the analytical, descriptive, and deductive methods, the research concluded eleven rules related to the pillars mentioned above, from which I dealt with in this research the rules related to (Almobayyan), and understanding the evidence, which are five rules: “The purpose of Bayan is to understand the speaker intention’ ,Human mind is a tool for perception and discrimination’’, ‘’the revelation texts have to be understood based on rules Arabs understanding of discourse’’, ‘’ If the word has only one possible meaning, then this meaning is assumed to be the speaker's intention, and if it has more than one possible meaning, then the apparent meaning is assumed to be his intention in the first place’’, and ''other meanings can be accepted only if they are possible, with existence of evidence that they are intended''.