A Semiotic Analysis of the Quranic Narrative of Abraham's (AS) Dream of Sacrificing His Son

Abstract

Some researchers consider the Quranic narrative of Abraham's dream of sacrificing his son, and its Torah pre-text, as evidence of the possibility of God issuing commands that contradict ethics. The Torah narrative explicitly states the command to sacrifice, but such explicitness is absent in the Quranic narrative. The aim of the semiotic analysis of the Quranic narrative is to uncover the hidden and implicit meanings of the text in order to decode the command that Abraham was tasked with through the dream. In this method, the Quranic narrative is analyzed from the perspectives of "Trans-textuality," "Intertextuality," "Hyper-textuality," "Archi-textuality," "Para-textuality," and "Intra-textuality." The semiotic analysis of this Quranic narrative from the perspective of "Intertextuality" shows that its partial presence with the Torah pre-text is close to zero. This analysis also shows that the Quranic narrative is a transformation of the Torah pre-text and, unlike it, has the significant addition of Abraham's dream and does not indicate a command to sacrifice. The analysis of the Quranic narrative from the perspective of Para-textuality and Intra-textuality shows that Abraham was commanded to confirm the interpretation of his dream, that is, to prove that he believed that the knife would not cut his son's throat with God's permission.