The Concept of Fear in the Qur’anic Text

Abstract

The Qur’an affirms that fear is a feeling or emotion immanent in human nature. There are several terms or expressions in the Qur’anic text that, to a greater or lesser extent, carry or convey the meaning of fear. The paper lexically and contextually explores their identical and distinctive features. There are nine Qur’anic terms that denotatively and connotatively indicate some kind of fear, anxiety or perhaps caution. There are three basic terms: taqwā, ẖawf and ẖašya, which are usually translated as fear and which are given most space in the paper. There are also “additional terms”, and they are: ḥiḏr, išfāq, rahab, fazaʻ, ruʻb and various derivatives of the root w-ğ-l. These terms, in the linguistic sense, form a separate semantic field where the term taqwā ranks at the very top of the semantic structure. Each of these basic and additional terms for fear in the Qur’anic text has its own semantic value by which they all differ from each other.