Intended Meaning
The Qur’an distinguishes between hearing, sight, and the heart as primary sources of knowledge This means that perception begins with the senses and then rises to more abstract levels
The Atom’s Structure in the Atlas
- Type of argument: definitional
- Argument movement: It makes hearing, sight, and the heart primary sources of knowledge.
- Key terms: hearing, sight, heart, knowledge.
- Degree of centrality: central.
It builds a cognitive order that begins with the senses and then gradually moves toward deeper understanding, and it grants the senses and the heart a foundational role. In this way, Qur’anic knowledge is connected to the basic stages of human perception.
Links that help with reading
- Muhammad Shahrur, The Book and the Qur’an
- The Book, the Qur’an, and the Mother of the Book
- Human knowledge is relative and progresses from sense perception to mathematics
Reliance
- Supporting text: “The Qur’an distinguishes between hearing, sight, and the heart as primary sources of knowledge.”
Place of Reliance in the Book
- Book: The Book and the Qur’an.
- Location: in the first section of the book in the discussion of knowledge
- Type of reliance: direct evidence.
- Marker for verification: hearing, sight, and the heart
- Reading note: the location is appropriate because it explicitly mentions the three terms and places them in the context of sensory, experiential, and theoretical knowledge.
Degree of Documentation
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom rests on an explicit witness close to the wording of the claim.
- Limits of reading: the formulation above is an analytical summary and is not treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted word for word.
Its Function in the Book
Its function here is declarative; it establishes a result on which what follows in the course of the argument depends.
Related to
Editorial Note
The summary preserves the idea of primary sources without adding anything.