Selected Hand Gestures in Sahih Muslim:

A Semiotic Analysis

Abstract

The present study aims mainly at the semiotic analysis of the hand gestures in the Prophetic Hadith. It is mainly concerned with interpreting the significance of hand gestures contextually in Sahih Muslim. It is based on the semiotic model of Charles Sanders Peirce. This model is tackled on two levels. Firstly, it analyzes each hand gesture to clarify the main three divisions of each sign; representamen, object, and interpretant. Secondly, this model offers another trichotomy, which is relevant to the study objectives. This trichotomy is the relation between the sign and its object, which classifies the hand gestures into three types; iconic, indexical, and symbolic. In a nutshell, an iconic gesture is the one that is similar to its object, an indexical one is the one that connects between the gesture and its object, and a symbolic gesture is the one which is understood conventionally. In addition, this study uses the English translation of Sahih Muslim, translated by Nasiruddin al-Khattab (2007), to clarify the meanings for Non-Arab readers. Some drawbacks of the corpus translations have been discussed, depending on the different Hadith interpretation books. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of comparing the hand gestures mentioned in the corpus in different contexts. This comparison is conducted on two levels; the narrower level within the selected hadiths from Sahih Muslim, and the wider level with other different cultures. On the narrower level, the repeated hand gestures with different meanings within the selected corpus are compared to each other, and this comparison has made the different significances clear. On the wider level, the hand gestures are compared to different cultures, which has confirmed the great importance of understanding the different significances of the hand gestures, since some gestures have positive significances within the corpus, while they have negative significances in other cultures. Findings showed that the semiotic analysis of the hand gestures in Sahih Muslim, and comparing these hand gestures of Hadith with different cultures has a great impact on understanding the exact meanings and avoids any misunderstandings in other cultures. For example, the different meanings of the V-shaped gesture, as discussed in the paper, compared to the significance of being close to the Prophet of the caretaker.