TY - JOUR AU - Berisha, Elma PY - 2017/10/15 Y2 - 2024/03/19 TI - The Contribution of Early Muslim Scholars to Semiotics: Selected Highlights and Implications JF - ICR Journal JA - ICR Journal VL - 8 IS - 4 SE - Article DO - 10.52282/icr.v8i4.162 UR - https://icrjournal.org/index.php/icr/article/view/162 SP - 507-521 AB - <p>In a previous article I have argued that the contribution of&nbsp;early Muslim scholars to Semiotics needs to be unearthed and highlighted.&nbsp;Semiotics is broadly defined as the study of signs or sign-use behaviour&nbsp;leading to communication and understanding between humans in society.&nbsp;Semiotics emerged in the early twentieth century as distinct from mainstream&nbsp;philosophy or philosophy of language. As an institutionalised academic&nbsp;discipline, semiotics has acknowledged the implicit contributions of earlier&nbsp;scholars from antiquity, the middle ages and early modernity. However, to&nbsp;date the contribution of Muslim scholars is conspicuously absent. Hence, in&nbsp;this article I intend to recapitulate perspectives from selected Muslim scholars&nbsp;in order to obtain a more balanced notion of sign-function and its potential&nbsp;implications. This is where the unique contributions of al-Ghazali (1058-1111)&nbsp;and Ibn Barrajan (n.d.-1141) come in, whose perspectives are reflected in key modern approaches to sign models and their interpretational tendencies. The&nbsp;article suggests that there is a need to explore the legacy of Muslim scholars in&nbsp;the field of semiotics in a much more systematic and comprehensive way, given that sign-based thinking (or the ayah doctrine) is a major theme in the Quran.</p> ER -