The modality of seeing is one of the primary ways through which we experience the cosmos. Early Christian preference of the writings of Plato and Aristotle, along with Euclid and Ptolemy’s works, emphasized seeing over other senses. This superiority of the modality of seeing remains a crucial factor that has shaped Western thought up until the project of enlightenment and modernity. It has also informed Muslim philosophical and scientific discourses. Key Quranic words such as cognates of ‘shahādah’, ‘ra’ِā’, ‘ʿayn’, ‘nazar’, ‘baṣar’ emphasize seeing and witnessing and describe our perceptual and reflective faculties. The identification of the Divine and all sorts of physical and metaphysical phenomena, including the cosmos and the Quran itself with light (nūr), extends the modality of seeing with light, certainty and illumination. It is not accidental that Muslim scientists such as Ibn al-Ḥaytham (d. 1040), who revolutionized the study of optics, and philosophers such as Suhrawardī (d. 1191), who founded the school of illumination, emphasized the foundationality of seeing and the primacy of light over other modalities of thinking and being. In modern physics, we have experienced the mimesis of metaphysics; the observer and the observed have elevated the modality of seeing over the subject and object distinction. In this paper, I aim to explore this problem using the following question: What is the telos of seeing? Is it contemplation? Is it affirmation? Is it witnessing? In shards and fragments in Quran, such as the opening verses of surah al-Insān, even the notion of human (insān), where the word ‘insān’ also means ‘pupil of the eye’, gets wrapped up in the cloak of ‘seeing.’ Quran asserts that there was a time (dahr) when the human was not even a thing mentioned. The Divine created the human, made him hearing and seeing (baṣīra). The chapter then transports the act of seeing the Divine— the face of Allah —to the feeding of an indigent, making the act of witnessing a teleological aim of our existence. As one reads, surah al-Insān, one experiences a synthesia of the notions of ‘human,’ ‘thing,’ ‘seeing,’ and ‘spring,’ a coalescence of aesthetic experience with the ‘being of being’.

In the Quran, intellect is not seen as a single homogenous entity; instead, it is differentiated in various forms, highlighting different aspects of cognition and understanding. In surah Rum, for example, four contiguous verses highlight these nuances. Quran asks you to reflect on how you dwell and says that in the creation of mates and affection and mercy placed between them are signs for those who give thought (یَتََف َّكُروَن). Quran directs you to look at the phenomena: in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of languages and colors are signs for those who know (ل ِّلَۡعٰلِِمیَن); in the circadian rhythms of day and night are signs for those who listen (یَسَۡمُعوَن); in the causal phenomena of lightning and rain, are signs for those who use reason This subset is part of a larger group of meaning structure that encompasses intellect and .)یَعِۡقلُوَن( understanding; other examples include ف ق ه (comprehend), ظ ن ن (thought, supposition, conjecture) and ح س ب (reckon). If we see intellect in Kantian terms, as a priori cognition forms, how do these categories of intellect contribute to the process of judgment, cognition, and perception? How do these categories relate to the modalities of hearing and seeing, and are they prior or posterior to hearing and seeing? In this paper, I will compare and contrast Quranic discourse on intellect and understanding using corpus linguistics and morphological analysis. In this context, I will employ network analysis and machine learning modeling on over 1600 roots that appear in the Quran to delineate the semantic changes, focusing on intertextuality and coherence multifarious senses of intellect. Some of the questions that I will address in this paper are as follows: How can we delineate a semantic structure of intellect and related concepts? How are they different? And in what ways are they similar? I will use the Quranic Arabic Corpus (Kais Dukes, 2011), which includes syntactic and morphological annotation of the Quran, and builds on the verified Arabic text distributed by the Tanzil project. I will also use Toshihiko Izutsu’s approach of semantic analysis, which examines the meaning of each word by breaking its complex structure into several well-defined constituents. By combining semantic analysis and algorithm-based corpus methodologies, I will attempt to develop a corpus-based hermeneutic methodology for the Quran, facilitating an understanding of the lexical changes across large swathes of texts.

Derrida accuses the Western episteme (if we are permitted to generalize) of favoring speech over writing, and prioritizing the presence of Being over its signs. Quran blurs this distinction and, from the outset, problematizes the relation between speech and text. It prompts its listener/reader to recite (’ iqrā’) and it valorizes the text by affirming the nobility of a lord (rabb) who teaches by the pen (ʿallama bil-qalam). Taking into account the post-structuralist dictum ‘language produces the subject’, this paper explores the possibility that if language speaks, rather than the subject, then the Quran, both in the sense of speech and text, is both a language event and language reality. The haunting, unforgettable absence of a subject plunges its listener/reader to become the subject and object of the text, conflating the Divine with the human. And if the sign/verse and divinity are born in the same place and time, then Quran becomes a representation of such a ‘sign/verse’ event. In the Quran, the violence of metaphysics occurs in the crucible of text and its protean forms, including revelation, speech, writing, and hearing. Beyond the event, the Quranic speech persists wrapped in the text, prefiguring as ‘the wrapped one’ (al-muzzamil) and ‘the enfolded one’ (al-mudathir). This aims to evaluate the relevance of Quranic semiotics in shifting the pre-modern emphasis on origin and center to the contemporary preponderance of the endless interpretation of the text. From gathering communities as people of the text (ahl al-kitāb), to contemplating the signs of the heavens and earth, to the passing of night into day, to the turning of individual souls as texts from which they are asked to recite (’ iqrā’ kitābik), every phenomenon can be seen as an inscribed text. The sight of lightning and the flash of Quranic verse occur in the same plane— the plane of the text.