Research Methodology in the Human Sciences

One of the fundamental challenges in the development of Islamic humanities is the absence of an indigenous, coherent, and epistemologically generative methodology for deriving concepts and theories from religious texts. Focusing on the "lexical discussions" (mabāḥith al-alfāẓ) within Uṣūl al-Fiqh (principles of jurisprudence), this article examines the hypothesis that the semiotic rules of Uṣūl al-Fiqh-such as those governing apparent meaning (ẓuhūr), generality and particularity (ʿumūm wa khuṣūṣ), absoluteness and restriction (iṭlāq wa taqyīd), context (siyāq), and implicative significations (madlūlāt iltizāmiyya)-can serve as a methodological framework for theorizing in the Islamic humanities. The research adopts an analytical-theoretical approach, grounded in the application of jurisprudential principles to conceptual structures within the human sciences. In each section of the article, a specific rule from the lexical discussions is introduced and analyzed, and examples from fields such as education, psychology, sociology, and political science are presented to demonstrate how these rules can extract coherent and theoretically productive propositions from religious texts. Furthermore, a step-by-step model is proposed for transforming religious concepts into scientific theories, encompassing the stages of problem selection, semiotic analysis, extraction of theoretical concepts, and theory evaluation within an Islamic framework. The findings indicate that the lexical discussions, as tools for the rational and linguistic understanding of texts, can provide a methodical and indigenous foundation for the development of Islamic humanities-a methodology that neither falls into hermeneutic subjectivism nor merely imitates secular Western models, but is instead grounded in intra-religious rational ijtihād.