Substantia: Jurnal Ilmu-Ilmu Ushuluddin

Qur’an journaling provides a setting in which practitioners relate scriptural reflection to gratitude, but the meanings of this experience require differentiation from claims of psychological improvement. This study asks how three experienced members of The Qur’an Journal Indonesia community make sense of gratitude and how their accounts converge and differ. Interview transcripts were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Personal Qur’an journals served as contextual material. Four gratitude-related themes from a broader set of 13 cross-case themes inform the discussion. The accounts support three overlapping meanings: recognizing blessings, responding through responsibility and action, and sustaining praise during difficulty. These meanings are interpretive groupings of the participants’ accounts. Praise during difficulty is explicit in the accounts of P2 and P3, while continued negligence, sustained effort, and discomfort qualify a uniformly positive interpretation. The study offers a situated account of gratitude as meaning-making and practice oriented toward Allah. The purposive selection of participants who already reported tranquility or gratitude and the retrospective design preclude causal or population-level conclusions.

Modern Qur’anic exegesis often calls for the critical screening of inherited reports, yet the relationship between an exegete’s declared standards and their actual practice remains insufficiently examined. This article investigates how Aḥmad Muṣṭafā al-Marāghī applies the principle of tamḥīṣ al-riwāyāt, articulated in the introduction to Tafsīr al-Marāghī, when interpreting narrative verses. Using qualitative library research and a comparative reading of the primary text, the study identifies eleven candidate passages and examines four selected cases in detail: Hārūt and Mārūt (Q. 2:102), Moses’ tablets (Q. 7:145), the accusation against Joseph (Q. 12:77), and the number of the Companions of the Cave (Q. 18:22). The analysis reconstructs three dimensions: sources of information, mechanisms of validation, and the epistemic status assigned to reports. The findings suggest that al-Marāghī’s screening is not synonymous with formal isnād criticism. His approach involves rational assessment, comparative verification of scriptural sources, explicit rejection of unreliable narratives, and interpretive preference accompanied by caution toward unsupported claims. The cases demonstrate different evaluative procedures that broadly correspond to al-Marāghī’s declared principles, although the grounds of particular decisions are not always sufficiently explicit to establish methodological consistency with equal certainty. The article therefore distinguishes internal methodological coherence from external verification and identifies a limited, functional role for information from the People of the Book.

This study examines the meaning of li ta‘ārafū in QS. al-Ḥujurāt [49]: 13 and the use of the term ta‘āruf in premarital literature. In contemporary Muslim discourse, ta‘āruf is frequently used to refer to the introduction between a man and a woman before marriage. The study asks three questions: what the verse means by li ta‘ārafū, how the term is used in premarital literature, and how the two meanings can be related. Using a qualitative library research design, it compares the interpretations of four exegetical works (Tafsīr al-Jalālain, Tafsīr Ibn Kaṡīr, Tafsīr al-Marāghī, and Tafsīr al-Miṣbāḥ) with premarital and marriage-related literature, mapping three aspects: the purpose of ta‘āruf, the parties involved, and the scope of the relationship. The exegetical works read the verse as a call to mutual recognition across tribal and national differences, while the premarital sources use the term mainly for recognizing a prospective spouse. In the sources examined, no explicit statement was found that limits the meaning of ta‘āruf exclusively to marriage. The premarital usage is therefore treated as a specialization of usage, not as a proven reduction of the verse’s meaning. Because several sources could be checked only through metadata or abstracts, this conclusion is provisional. The study proposes that ta‘āruf be understood as an ethical principle of mutual recognition, within which premarital use is one application.