Every book pursues a purpose. But when that Book is the Qur’an, the question takes on a graver weight: what, exactly, does the Revelation aim at? Toward what does it tend, beyond the diversity of its verses — narratives, laws, exhortations, descriptions of the hereafter? Muslim scholars named this inquiry the science of the maqâsid al-Qur’ân, the purposes or aims of the Qur’an (from maqsid, plural maqâsid: intention, aim; one also speaks of ghâya, the end, the goal). Two great families of answers emerge: that of the classical exegetes and theologians, and that of the Sufis. Far from opposing each other, they often prove to be two depths of a single reading.
Two things not to confuse: the purposes of the Qur’an and the purposes of the Law
A clarification is needed at the outset, for the confusion is common. The maqâsid al-sharîʿa — the purposes of the Law — designate the great interests that Islamic legislation seeks to preserve. Al-Ghazâlî, then al-Shâtibî, classically reduced them to five necessities: the preservation of religion (dîn), life (nafs), reason (ʿaql), lineage (nasl) and property (mâl).
The maqâsid al-Qur’ân have a broader scope. They concern not only the normative (legal) dimension of Islam, but the overall aim of the Qur’anic discourse: what the Qur’an seeks to bring about in the soul and in the world. The Law is but one part of this design; the purposes of the Qur’an encompass and exceed it. This is why the scholars who worked on both notions never used them as synonyms.
The classical approach: what the Qur’an seeks to make known
Al-Ghazâlî and the “jewels” of the Qur’an
The pivotal text of this tradition is a short treatise by al-Ghazâlî (d. 505 H / 1111), the Jawâhir al-Qur’ân — “The Jewels of the Qur’an.” There appears, perhaps for the first time in this form, an explicit theory of the purposes of the Qur’an, which later scholars such as al-Suyûtî would still quote.
Al-Ghazâlî compares the verses to jewels (jawâhir) and pearls (durar): the former are the verses of knowledge — those that make God known, His essence, His attributes and His acts; the latter, the practical verses — those that trace the straight path and urge one to follow it. From this he draws six purposes, in three principal and three complementary.
The three principal purposes:
- To make known the One to whom man is called — God (maʿrifat Allâh): the heart of tawhîd, subdivided into knowledge of the Essence (al-dhât), the Attributes (al-sifât) and the Acts (al-afʿâl).
- To make known the straight path (al-sirât al-mustaqîm), the way to be travelled in advancing toward Him.
- To make known the state at the journey’s end (al-hâl ʿinda al-wusûl): the condition of man once he has reached God — the hereafter, Paradise and Hell.
The three complementary purposes refine the previous ones: the state of those who answered the call (the prophets and the saints); the state of those who denied it (and the refutation of their unbelief); and finally the stations and provisions of the road — that is, the prescriptions, the lawful and the unlawful, the limits set by God. These six purposes branch, with him, into some ten types.
What is striking is the architecture: for al-Ghazâlî, a perfectly orthodox theologian, the Qur’an is ordered like a journey — to know God, to walk toward Him, to reach Him. The supreme purpose of the Book is the knowledge of God and of the Last Day, and the mind ascends from the works to the attributes, then to the Essence, the highest and most difficult to attain.
From the triad to the contemporary “renaissance”
Other scholars condensed the object of the Qur’an into a few founding principles. The most widespread formula retains a triad: tawhîd (belief), nubuwwa (prophethood and the Law it brings) and maʿâd (eschatology, the return to God). The commentator al-Biqâʿî (d. 885 H), known for his great work on the internal coherence of the Qur’an (Nazm al-durar), adds a fourth foundation, the divine decree (qadar).
This way of condensing the Qur’an into a few foundations is ancient. Al-Shâtibî (d. 790 H), the great theorist of the purposes of the Law, already insisted on the unity of the object of the Qur’an: the Meccan sûras lay down its principles — belief, worship, uprightness — which the rest of the Book unfolds. Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751 H), for his part, brings the whole Qur’an back to tawhîd in its various faces: informing about God (making Him known), calling to worship Him alone, prescribing the rights that flow from it, and describing the fate of those who respond and of those who turn away.
In the modern era, the notion enjoys a true renaissance. Remarkably, the number of purposes retained varies from one author to another, from one to ten: where some reduce the object of the Qur’an to a single principle, Rashîd Ridâ (d. 1935) counts ten, and Ibn ʿÂshûr (d. 1973) eight. This latitude shows that the maqâsid are not a fixed list, but a way of embracing the overall intention. Above all, the field widens: beyond theology alone, contemporaries insist on the reform of belief, the education of the soul (tarbiya, tazkiya) and the reform of society.
Ibn ʿÂshûr gives the most systematic example. In the fourth introduction to his great commentary al-Tahrîr wa-l-tanwîr, he draws by induction eight purposes: the reform of belief; the rectification of morals (akhlâq); legislation; the good governance of the community; the stories of past nations; teaching adapted to the needs of each age; exhortation, warning and glad tidings; and finally the demonstration of the Qur’an’s inimitability (iʿjâz) as proof of the Prophet’s veracity. And he subordinates the whole to a supreme purpose (al-maqsad al-aʿlâ): the reform of the individual, of society and of civilization — a reform that, for him, begins with the purification of thought, which itself depends on the soundness of belief.
To these vast frameworks answer more concentrated syntheses. Saʿîd Nûrsî (d. 1960), in his monumental Risale-i Nur, brings the aims of the Qur’an back to four, which he shows run through its every page: tawhîd, prophethood (nubuwwa), resurrection (hashr), and justice joined to worship (ʿadl and ʿibâda) — a reading at once doctrinal and deeply contemplative. Closer to us, Tâhâ Jâbir al-ʿAlwânî (d. 2016) proposes three “governing” purposes (al-maqâsid al-hâkima), from which all the rest flows: tawhîd, the purification of the soul (tazkiya) and the building of civilization (ʿumrân) — where the inner and the social dimensions are held together as one. Yûsuf al-Qaradâwî likewise devoted an entire book to how to “engage with the Qur’an” and to its purposes. So many answers, old and new, to a single question: toward what, in the end, does the Qur’an seek to lead us?
The Sufi approach: the Qur’an as a path to God
The Sufis do not contradict this reading: they deepen its center. If the Qur’an seeks to “make God known,” then its ultimate purpose is the knowledge of God (maʿrifa) — not merely a knowledge about God, but an inner recognition, a science of the heart. And the operative purpose, the one that makes this knowledge possible, is the purification of the soul (tazkiyat al-nafs). The Qur’an itself hammers it home: “He has succeeded who purifies it” (91:9).
On this point, the mystical tradition speaks with one voice, from its origins. From the oldest Sufi commentary that has come down to us, that of al-Tustarî (d. 283 H), to the Subtleties of the Allusions (Latâ’if al-ishârât) of al-Qushayrî (d. 465 H), one and the same conviction recurs: the end of the Qur’an is the knowledge of God and the polishing of the heart. With Ibn ʿArabî (d. 638 H), it culminates in the idea that the Book leads man to realize tawhîd fully and to become the mirror in which the divine names contemplate themselves.
One then measures how al-Ghazâlî’s structure — to know God, to travel the path, to reach Him — is already, in itself, the map of a journey (sulûk). This is what makes him the great bridge between Sunni theology and Sufism: the same man wrote the Jawâhir al-Qur’ân, the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihyâ’ ʿulûm al-dîn) and The Niche of Lights (Mishkât al-anwâr). With him, doctrinal purpose and spiritual purpose are one.
In this light, the Sufi reading privileges in the Qur’an a set of great spiritual themes that form, as it were, its heart: sincerity (ikhlâs), lived tawhîd, the purification of the heart (tazkiya), the accord of knowledge and action (ʿilm and ʿamal), guidance, the virtues of excellence (iHsân), love (maHabba) and preferring others to oneself (îthâr), remembrance (dhikr), watchfulness of the heart (murâqaba) and meditation (tafakkur); and, among the most elevated themes, the reconciliation of opposites (jamʿ al-aḍdâd) and the contemplation of the Face of God (wajh Allâh). Sufism makes of these no system: it recognizes these motifs, present throughout the Book, as the major accents of the life of the soul.
These last themes belong properly to the mystical tradition. The jamʿ al-aḍdâd — holding together what reason separates, transcendence and nearness, fear and hope — is a motif dear to the school of Ibn ʿArabî. It is here too that the most debated doctrine of speculative Sufism is found, the oneness of being (wahdat al-wujûd), in which some read the ultimate secret of “there is no deity but God.” This speculative extremity is precisely the point where orthodoxy grows cautious.
Convergences and tensions
What is most remarkable is the breadth of the agreement. The purification of the soul and the knowledge of God are not Sufi additions: they stand, with al-Ghazâlî as with Ibn ʿÂshûr, at the very summit of the purposes of the Qur’an. When the Sufi says that the Book seeks to lead the servant to his Lord, he merely names from within what the theologian has posited: to know God is the noblest of the sciences, and the goal the Qur’an pursues. At this level, spiritual exegesis is fully validated by orthodoxy — Sunni, Shiite or Ibadite.
Tension arises only at the margin, where interpretation ceases to rest on the letter and claims an inspiration or a metaphysics hard to substantiate — the most speculative readings of the oneness of being, for instance. The problem, here again, is less that of the nature of the purpose envisaged than that of its measure and its source: how far can one read into the text without making it say what it does not say? All the wisdom of the tradition lies in this balance.
Conclusion: one purpose, several depths
Whether counted as three, six or eight, the purposes of the Qur’an converge toward a single focus: to make God known, to purify the soul, and to lead man to Him. The classical approach draws its architecture — belief, path, return; the Sufi approach inhabits its great spiritual themes — sincerity, purification of the heart, love, contemplation. They are not two Qur’ans, but two degrees of reading of a single Word: one illumines what is to be believed and done, the other, what is to be become.
It is in this spirit that we study the Book in our online tafsîr courses: not only as a text to be explained, but as a way to be travelled.
See also: Comparative table of the major tafsirs