Interpretations of Literality: Muslim Legal Hermeneutics and Whitman's Five Questions

Jon Whitman, in his opening contribution to the collection of essays Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period , poses questions about interpretive communities' assessment of the "literal sense" of canonical texts, about the criteria for downplaying parts of these texts in the process of allegorization, about the influence of enhanced allegorization on changes in the interpretive communities, and the continuities of idiom and orientation behind such changes. This essay discusses the answers that can be derived from the Muslim tradition, and, in particular, from the system of Muslim legal hermeneutics known as uṣūl al-fiqh , to these questions, and explores how these questions can illuminate interdisciplinary understanding of the functions of the literal sense in contrasting intellectual traditions.