سید حسین هاشمی

The comprehension of Qur’anic legal texts ( āyāt al-aḥkām ) is a complex process central to Islamic jurisprudence. While traditional hermeneutics ( Uṣūl al-Fiqh ) provides interpretive principles, the specific cognitive-linguistic inference types mobilized by jurists and their teachability remain underexplored in empirical research. Therefore, the current research aimed to explore the inference types mobilized during the jurisprudential interpretation of Qur’anic texts and then investigate the effect of their explicit training on jurisprudential comprehension among advanced learners of seminary schools in Iran. To this purpose, a sequential mixed-methods design was employed. The initial qualitative phase used a phenomenographic approach, analyzing data from expert interviews (n = 6), documentary research, and a literature review to identify key inference types. The subsequent quantitative phase utilized a pre-test/ intervention/ post-test design with an intact class of senior jurisprudence learners (N=17). A researcher-developed test measured comprehension before and after a five-session intervention that provided explicit instruction on the identified linguistic inferences. The qualitative phase identified nine core linguistic inference types essential for jurisprudential comprehension, including Backward Build-Up, Elaboration, Causation, Pragmatism, Analogy, Prediction, Instrumentation, Semantic Framing, and Cognitive Space Blending. The quantitative phase also revealed a statistically significant improvement in jurisprudential comprehension following the intervention. A paired-samples t-test showed a significant mean score increase from 11.71 (SD = 2.28) in the pre-test to 16.76 (SD = 1.20) in the post-test (t (16) = −13.73, p < .001), with a mean gain of 5.06 points. The findings confirm that jurisprudential reasoning operates through a definable set of linguistic inferences that must be learned.