Context of situation in Imam al-Ghazali’s, al-Mustasfa

Abstract

This paper is not concerned with the life and thought of al-Ghazali or his book ‘al-Mustafa min Ilm al-Usoul’. Rather, it primarily sets out to shed light on context of situation, a significant sociolinguistic topic addressed in-depth in the book. This important topic has a great bearing on unveiling the intended meaning and clarifying otherwise ambiguous discourse. In fact, al-Ghazali often resorted to the context of situation which plays an important role in incorporating meaning into discourse. He, amazingly, drew attention to the influence of habit, the speaker’s social class, collocation, intonation, and body language on mapping out discourse meaning. On the other hand, he considered the context of situation a valid reference to decide the generality or specificity of discourse; on the other, it is a tool for unraveling its ambiguity and confirming probability. In this respect, he shows how the context of situation can spell out whether structures are used literally or metaphorically or whether their surface meaning is different from their underlying or intended import. All these aspects are investigated and compared in view of the insights of modern linguistics. As for ‘al-MustaSfa’, al-Ghazali states that he wrote it when some students of linguistics incessantly requested him to write a book on the ‘USuul al-Fiqh’ (roots of philology)(2). What is noteworthy in the books of the Imaam, who died 900 years ago, is that he, being a philologist and philosopher, was conversed in the linguistic lesson in general and in the concept of context of situation in particular. Thus, he can be truly considered as one of those who laid the first bricks of this theory in Arabic some 900 years ago.