Qira’at Mutawatirah dan Pluralitas Makna Al-Qur’an: Rekonstruksi melalui Hermeneutika Kontekstual Abdullah Saeed

Abstract

The study of qirā’āt has predominantly developed within scholarly frameworks that emphasize the transmission and authenticity of reports, linguistic analysis, and juridical implications, while its engagement with contemporary Qur’anic hermeneutics remains relatively limited. At the same time, Abdullah Saeed’s contextualist hermeneutics has been widely employed to interpret legal, ethical, and social verses, but has rarely been operationalized to examine the diversity of Qur’anic readings. This study aims to analyze the relationship between qirā’āt mutawātirah and the plurality of Qur’anic meanings through a reconstruction of Abdullah Saeed’s contextualist hermeneutics and to formulate its implications for the development of multidimensional Qur’anic interpretation. This research employs a qualitative library research method using a hermeneutical approach and descriptive-analytical analysis. The analysis focuses on two cases of qirā’āt mutawātirah: QS. al-Mā’idah [5]: 6, particularly the variants arjulakum/arjulikum, and QS. al-Baqarah [2]: 222, particularly the variants yaṭhurna/yaṭṭahharna. The findings indicate that the variations in qirā’āt in these two verses do not merely represent differences in the forms of recitation but may open possibilities for semantic plurality at the linguistic level and in their juridical implications. Saeed’s framework, through the three horizons—world behind the text, world of the text, and world in front of the text along with his concept of a hierarchy of values, can be employed to map the relationship between historical context, the linguistic structure of the text, and the actualization of meaning within the reader’s context. From this perspective, variations in Qur’anic readings can be understood as forms of semantic plurality that remain within the framework of accepted qirā’āt transmission, while distinguishing between fundamental values and their implementational forms