Educational Insights in the Parenthetical Sentences in the Story of Musa (peace be upon him) in the Glorious Qur’an

Abstract

This study adopts a comprehensive inductive approach to explore the story of Prophet Musa (peace be upon him) across all the Surahs of the Glorious Qur’an, both Makki and Madani. It focuses on analyzing parenthetical sentences, whether a single sentence or multiple, by identifying their position, cause, meaning, and rhetorical benefit, followed by highlighting the educational insight embedded within each case. The study is divided into two main sections, with two subsections each. The first section introduces the concept of educational insight and parenthetical sentence, and it includes two subsections. The first subsection defines both concepts and reviews the perspectives of grammarians, rhetoricians, and scholars of Qur’anic sciences regarding the stylistic function of parenthetical expressions. It also discusses the distinction between parenthetical and circumstantial sentences, due to their semantic proximity, and outlines the conditions under which separation between syntactically related elements is permissible. The second subsection presents the scholarly reasons for using parenthetical sentences, identifying seven key purposes cited in classical sources. The second section focuses on the instances of parenthetical sentences within the Qur’anic narrative of Musa (peace be upon him), and it includes two subsections. The first subsection addresses cases where a single sentence serves as a parenthetical expression, either as a medial interjection or as an additive statement, the latter being the more frequent. The second subsection examines instances involving two or more sentences, including full verses or multiple verses functioning as interjected comments, such as in Surah Ṭāhā. The study concludes that there are twenty-three instances of parenthetical sentences in the story of Musa (peace be upon him), with fourteen involving a single sentence and nine involving multiple sentences. These occurrences are found in the following Surahs: (Al-Baqarah, Al-Aʿrāf, Yūnus, Ṭāhā, Al-Mu’minūn, Ash-Shuʿarā’, Al-Qaṣaṣ, and Ghāfir), seven of which are Makki and one (Al-Baqarah) is Madani. The reasons for using parenthetical expressions total twelve, the most common being emphasis, appearing in seven places, and the remaining reasons are distributed across the other places. Each place reveals a significant educational insight that, collectively, offers a valuable framework for educating future generations according to the Prophetic methodology.