Contextual Significations of al-birr and al-qisṭ in the Qur'an: A Semiotic Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on Saussure's (1916/1959) semiotic approach, this paper explores the various meanings pertaining to the concepts of al-birr (kindness) and al-qisṭ (justice) in the Qur'an. More specifically, this paper attempts to probe the extent to which Saussure's langue/parole binary can enhance our understanding of the Qur'anic language. The paper seeks to fulfil three main objectives: (i) identifying the various significations communicated by al-birr and al-qisṭ in the Qur'an; (ii) showing the extent to which the historical and theological context helps to mark the various significations associated with each term; and (iii) highlighting the practical meanings the two terms convey within their different contexts in the Qur'an. This paper has two main findings: first, the two words of al-birr and al-qisṭ communicate various meanings that are contextually shaped; and second, both al-birr and al-qisṭ portray Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance and being committed to fostering societal harmony through the principles of kindness and justice. Further, the findings of this study are anticipated to contribute to cross-cultural communication by fostering intercultural dialogue amongst people from diverse cultural backgrounds and, therefore, challenge the narratives in some media that represent Islam as intolerant or harsh towards non-Muslims and narrow a cultural gap that has always been nurtured and sustained by a We-Them discourse.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".