Qur’anic Words: An Analysis on Shihab’s Rules of Exegesis in Tafsir Al-Mishbah

Shihab is an Islamic scholar who has prolifically produced a comprehensive 30 chapters of Qur’anic exegesis entitled Tafsir Al-Mishbah. This book is perceived as the latest Qur’anic exegesis produced by Muslim scholar of the Archipelago. He stresses on the importance of understanding the Qur’an contextually, supported by a strong understanding of the language and not focusing only on the textual meaning. In relation to this, his work has used a lot of linguistics approaches as to obtain the actual verses exegeses. Therefore, this study seeks to analyse critically his linguistics exegesis, and the focus rests on the debate on Qur’anic words. To obtain an explicitness perspective, this study has adopted the library research and document analysis method by making language and reliable popular Qur’anic exegesis books as primary sources of reference. The outcome of this study finds that Shihab had applied five rules in relation to Qur’anic words, all of which have been approved by scholars and exegetes. In addition, this study also found that Shihab absolutely consistent in applying these rules, except in the first rule. By doing so, it was slightly crippled his exegetical work. Finally, this study suggests that it is not possible that a grammatical error occurs in the Qur’an. Indeed, the essence of the Arabic language rules is unparalleled with the structure of the Qur’an, but the arrangement rule was implemented after the Qur’an was revealed. If both cannot be made consistent with one another, then this is due to the limitation of method which is known as shādh.