The significance of hermeneutics for Islam has been appre-ciated increasingly by many leading scholars in both the Muslim and the Western world for the last decades. The works of the late professor Fazlur Rahman in the line of Schleiermacher and Betti, and those of M. Arkoun in the line of deconstructionism, have been the most influential hermeneutical studies. Besides, in criticizing the historical Islamic tradition, the feminist movements in the Islamic world often follow J. Habermas in his critique of ideology. Most of the traditional methods of interpretation of the Qur’an do not seem aware of the modern hermeneutical problems as well as the new approaches; their adherents often approach hermeneutic studies mistrustfully.

To my knowledge, the question of author’s intention, a specific hermeneutical problem, is far from being a subject of hermeneutical inquiries in Muslim world at present. However, it is well known that the problem of the intention of God has been playing a practically determinative role in both political and legal interpretations of the Qur’an throughout the history of Islam. Nonetheless, it has not thus far been taken into account as a theoretical problem of interpre-tation.

For a modern scholar, the significance of the problem of the author’s intention lies mostly in the problem of textual identity. It can be argued even that the basic difference between modernist and traditionalist views of Islam should be sought in the problem of textual identity. Though these problems above have not yet become a subject to the theoretical debates in Islamic world, they constitute the background of the dispute over the issue of fidelity to the text between the modernists and the traditionalists. Whether textual identity (and hence the fidelity to text) lies in the author’s intention or not appear then to be decisive issue which the scholars must tackle with.

Since the intention of the author cannot be taken as something present at hand in the process of interpretation, the problem of the historicity and temporality of text becomes decisive whenever the author’s intention is discussed. Due to the increasing challenge of the Western world view to the traditional Islamic view, the Muslim consciousness of time and history has changed. Accordingly, whenever the emphasis is put either on the past or on the present, the author’s intention and then textual identity is assumed to be objectified either in the past (traditional) or present (modernist) understandings of Islam. The significance of the concept of tradition as the historical continuity of textual meaning lies in overcoming this one sidedness of the traditionalist and the modernist approaches.

One should look for the identity of text not in terms of one of the dimensions of time or history but reversely in the historical continuity of the text, yet without falling victim to an Hegelian absolutism. Even though the Islamic notion of unity (tawhid) when taken adequately is the identity within difference, nonetheless, it has been approached mostly from an absolutist (transcendental) pers-pective. Consequently, the problem of the authority of interpretation has had negative practical impact within Islamic societies. It is not surprising that the authoritative interpretations of the Qur’an has been viewed by many believers to have attained God’s intention as far as possible.

However, when the temporality of the human experience of textual meaning is conceived properly, the notion of the being of the text comes to foreground and interpretation (and author’s intention) disappears within it. Then, the identity of text and the author’s intention are inspected not by way of a subject-object ontology, as did F. Rahman, but in a continuous dialogue between past and present. When the historical (transcendental) and historical (tem-poral) are separated on behalf of objectivity, falling victim either to absolutism or to radical relativism becomes unavoidable. An ade-quate way to overcome these problems can be found in the notion of finitude of human experience, which approaches eternity within temporality, and the transcendental within concrete events.