THE COGNITIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF ANIMAL IMAGERY IN SELECTED HOLY QURANIC VERSES

Abstract

The dominance of animal imagery in the Holy Qur’an is already recognized in recent scholarship as having a symbolic and metaphoric role, but still, the synthesis that would bring together modern cognitive linguistic paradigms with traditional Islamic exegesis is not found. This article attempts to fill such a gap by providing a twofold-perspective analysis, by combining the cognitive meaning of such imagery with its symbolic implications in an Islamic hermeneutic perspective. This research is a qualitative which operationalized the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT henceforth) as theorized by Lakoff and Johnson. An intentionally eight verses of animal images of the Holy Qur’an were chosen to analyze spider, ant, bee, fly, gnat/mosquito, dog, donkey, and cow. The insights provided by the classics of Arabic rhetoric, especially that of Al-Jurjani, and by exegetical literature of Al-Zamakhshari and Al-Razi, were then triangulated with the cognitive readings in order to situate the metaphors in the cultural and theological spaces. The results indicate that the use of animal images in the Holy Qur’an is an incredibly complex rhetorical and cognitive tool. This convergent method supports the fact that the i‘jaz of the Quranic language, the text has an impact on the cognitive-linguistic and symbolic-rhetorical planes, at the same time, providing a more profound understanding of its persuasive power. By expanding the data considerably and introducing classical rhetorical and exegetical views, the study stresses the amount of symbolic significance that animal imagery has been attributed in the Holy Qur’an .