Ibn Rushd's understanding of religious language

In our thesis, we tried to put forward the philosopher Ibn Rushd's understanding of religious language. In our work, we aim to determine the position and the significance of religious language through Ibn Rushd's basic writings – which is one of the main issues of the philosophy of religion that became a systematic discipline in 19th century –in both Islamic intellectual tradition and present philosophy of religion. While discussing our philosopher's opinions about the topic, we tried to determine and explain generally what basic approaches and concepts of today's religious language discussions correspond in our philosopher's world of thought and the counterparts of some ideas and concepts in his world of thought in modern religious language discussions. We aimed at finding answer to questions of whether he mentions about representative (tems̱īl), tashbīhī, apophatic (tenzīhī), metaphorical (majāzī) and symbolic language approaches which are of the modern religious language and if he does, from which perspective he discusses them. At the same time, we analyzed comparatively what utterances of Sharia (alfāzu al-sharīʿa) such as interpretation (taʾwīl), figurative usage (al-majāz), allegory (ramz) and metaphor (istiʿāra) correspond in modern religious language discussions. Besides, while analyzing Ibn Rushd's understanding of religious language; although seeds of issues like hermeneutics and analogy are encountered, we couldn't determine any argument that can be ground to make an idea about modern language theories such as language game, principle of verification and falsification. Ibn Rushd accepts divine text's exoteric (dhāhir) and esoteric (bāṭin) sides; from this point of view, he approaches to topic of religious language based on classification of people's understandings into burhānî, jadalî, khatabî. He thinks that because divine texts are exoteric (dhāhir), common people (ʿavām) should understand them exoteric (dhāhir) and since some parts of divine text are esoteric, common people (ʿavām) should understand it exoteric but educated people (ḫavāṣ) should interpret them as esoteric (bāṭin). Also, he thinks that interpretation of the divine texts as fully exoteric or fully esoteric is a mistake. Understanding divine texts in a way that one side of this understanding is used can lead misunderstanding of divine texts and at the same time, it is against to rational realities. In his opinion, this is because divine texts on the one hand address to all humans, on the other hand, there are verses which are about mainly attributes of Allah, and states of the hereafter, and some metaphysical topics that can only be understood and interpreted by burhān-people. So, such reductive understanding of divine texts leads to mistakes.