A Short Article — MMS Global Foundation Research Series

August 2026

Introduction

The Qur’an announces its own teaching method near the beginning of its longest sūrah: “Indeed, Allah is not ashamed to present an example — that of a mosquito or what is smaller than it” (Q 2:26). Nothing is too humble to carry divine instruction, and the parable itself divides its hearers: believers recognise the truth it bears, while mockers are led further astray. Analogy in the Qur’an is therefore never mere ornament. It is an epistemic bridge that carries the mind from what it knows — locusts, palm trunks, seeds, rain, spiders, donkeys, the blink of an eye — to what it cannot directly perceive: the terror of resurrection, the futility of false reliance, the multiplication of sincere charity, the immediacy of the divine command.

This article examines the Qur’anic analogy (tashbīh, and its compound form tamthīl) from three converging angles: the classical rhetoric of ʿilm al-bayān, a modern formal-logical analysis, and contemporary educational research on analogical learning. Its central claim is that the Qur’anic method exhibits, with remarkable consistency, the very features that empirical research would identify fourteen centuries later as the conditions of effective analogical instruction.

The Classical Framework

Arabic rhetoric analyses every simile into four pillars (arkān): al-mushabbah, the thing likened (the target, usually less known); al-mushabbah bihi, the thing likened to (the source, usually more familiar and stronger in the shared quality); wajh al-shabah, the ground of resemblance; and adāt al-tashbīh, the particle of comparison — the kāf (“like”), ka-anna (“as if”), or mithl / ka-mathal. Al-Hāshimī, in Jawāhir al-balāgha, defines tashbīh as a contract of similarity between two or more things, sharing one or more attributes, established with an instrument of comparison for a purpose the speaker intends the hearer to know.

The classification of any analogy depends on which pillars are expressed. When the ground of resemblance is unstated, the simile is mujmal, and the hearer must infer the wajh al-shabah from context. When the ground is not a single attribute but a composite scene extracted from several elements, the simile is tamthīlī, and interpreting it requires mapping an entire relational configuration. Both forms dominate the Qur’anic corpus, and — as argued below — this is pedagogically significant rather than accidental.

Studies synthesising the exegetical tradition (al-Anṣārī, 2010; Dabash, Meqdad & AlShamali, 2023) identify recurring characteristics of the Qur’anic similitudes: universality of the source domain, drawn from nature and daily life so that every community in every age can read them; rootedness in lived experience, which gives them force upon the heart; contextual fitness, each image calibrated to its argumentative setting; precision of diction, where a single word can concentrate the whole comparison; sobriety of imagination, vivid but disciplined; and an anthropocentric orientation, the whole system serving the guidance of the human being.

The Logical Form of the Mathal

Borrmann (2021) reconstructs the Qur’anic mathal with three logical concepts. First, an analogy is an identity of relations: two terms which, within a shared context, can be exchanged for one another — not because they mean the same thing, but because each clarifies the other, as when Q 43:56 pairs salaf (“precedent”) and mathal (“example”). Second, analogies are non-ampliative, like logical conclusions: they add no new proposition about the target but illuminate a relation already present yet unspelt — exactly what the rhetoricians meant by saying tashbīh serves bayān, making-clear. Third, the mathal operates by universal instantiation: a named instance stands pars pro toto for a general truth, as the maidens of Paradise “as if rubies and coral” (Q 55:58) instantiate a shared radiance, and the cup-bearers “as if guarded pearls” (Q 52:24) instantiate a relation — youth to setting as pearl to sheltering shell.

This account converges strikingly with structure-mapping theory (Gentner, 1983), the dominant cognitive model of analogy, which holds that effective analogies map relations, not attributes, from source to target. When Q 29:41 likens those who take protectors other than Allah to the spider that takes a house, the mapping concerns the relation of refuge to reliance — the frailest of houses against the need for shelter — not the tensile properties of silk. The classical doctrine of the composite wajh al-shabah formalised this relational preference a millennium before cognitive science.

Case Study: Sūrat al-Qamar

Sūrat al-Qamar (Q 54), an admonitory sūrah rehearsing the destruction of the nations that denied their messengers, contains four analogies whose imagery is welded verse by verse to its argument (Dabash, Meqdad & AlShamali, 2023). In all four the ground of resemblance is left unstated — the similes are mujmal, demanding and rewarding contemplation.

“As if they were scattered locusts” (54:7). Humanity emerges from the graves like locusts spreading. Ibn ʿĀshūr observes that the intended picture is the locust young before their wings appear: since the locust lays its eggs in the earth, the swarm crawls out of holes in the ground, surging over one another — the resurrected resemble locusts in the very manner of emergence, wingless, jostling, eyes humbled. The parallel image of Q 101:4, “like moths dispersed,” shares the ground of panic-stricken profusion; Ibn ʿAṭiyya harmonises the two as successive moments — first the blind surging of moths, then the directed swarm toward the caller.

“As if they were trunks of uprooted palm-trees” (54:20). The people of ʿĀd are torn out by the screaming wind like palm stumps. Al-Rāzī enumerates the admissible faces of the image: their prostration like felled trunks; the manner of removal, plucked whole from their beds; and the violence required, since the palm is the very image of rootedness. The participle munqaʿir — “torn up from the root” — fixes the ground in the totality of extraction: what seemed most firmly planted is wrenched out entire.

“Like the dry stubble of the pen-builder” (54:31). One shout, and Thamūd become like hashīm al-muḥtaẓir — the dry, broken brushwood a herdsman gathers and strews on the ground before raising it into a fence for his flock. Al-Ṭabarī compresses the pathos: they became perished stubble after having been fresh and alive. The tribe that hamstrung the she-camel in insolent strength is left as the driest, cheapest matter in the desert economy.

“Like the glance of the eye” (54:50). The fourth analogy differs in purpose: “Our command is but one, like a glance of the eye.” Here the unstated ground is instantaneity. No hearer has witnessed the mode of the divine command; the blink — the fastest event in embodied experience — gives the mind a handle on absolute immediacy. Ibn ʿĀshūr judges it among the most eloquent comparisons in Arabic speech. Where the first three similes serve taqbīḥ (displaying the ugliness of the likened state), this one serves bayān ḥāl, clarifying a state otherwise unknown.

The Wider Corpus and Its Purposes

The same relational architecture runs through the amthāl of the whole Qur’an. The hypocrites are the fire-kindler plunged into darkness at the moment sight was promised (2:17). Sincere charity is the seed that yields seven hundred grains (2:261); ostentatious charity is dust on a smooth stone, stripped bare by the first rain, while the sincere deed is a garden on high ground that fruits doubly under the same rain (2:264–265) — a deliberate contrastive pair in which the variable is not the trial but the rooting of the deed. ʿĪsā is likened to Ādam, created from dust by the word “Be” (3:59) — analogy operating as formal argument. The scholar who abandons revelation for desire is the dog that pants whether driven away or left alone (7:176); those entrusted with the Torah who do not carry it are the donkey laden with volumes (62:5) — possession of knowledge without comprehension, an image Borrmann sets beside Schopenhauer’s learners who carry the ladder’s rungs instead of climbing them.

Across the corpus, four rhetorical purposes (aghrāḍ) dominate: bayān ḥāl, clarifying the unknown through the known; taqbīḥ, making baseness felt through disgust and recoil; taḥsīn and targhīb, beautification and the awakening of desire, as in the similes of Paradise; and iqāmat al-ḥujja, the establishment of proof, as when the revival of dead earth by rain grounds the inference to the revival of the dead. In every case the analogy is placed exactly where the argument needs the heart, not only the mind, to move; context is not the backdrop of the Qur’anic analogy but one of its constituents.

The Qur’anic Method and Modern Learning Research

Educational research has established when analogies teach and when they mislead. Analogy transfers relational structure from a familiar source to an unfamiliar target and can trigger genuine knowledge restructuring (Gentner, 1983; Mason & Sorzio, 1996); classroom studies show it acting as sense-maker, memory aid, transformer and motivator (Venville & Treagust, 1996; Guerra-Ramos, 2011), and quasi-experimental work records measurable achievement gains from analogy instruction (Ukoh & Adejimi, 2018). Yet analogies are “double-edged swords” (Glynn, 1990): every analogy breaks down somewhere, and effective use requires a genuinely familiar source, an unambiguous relational mapping, explicit attention to breakdown points (Glynn, 1991; Treagust et al., 1992), and — decisively — the learner’s own active construction of the mapping, which Mason and Sorzio (1996) found more powerful than any analogy merely presented and justified by the teacher.

Set the Qur’anic practice beside this checklist and the convergence is point-for-point. Its sources are universally familiar — fire, rain, seed, locust, donkey — satisfying the first empirical condition without exception. Its mappings are systematically relational, not attributional. Its prized form is the remote, reflection-demanding comparison (baʿīd gharīb), matching the finding that far-domain analogies, requiring deeper processing, are better remembered (Halpern, Hansen & Riefer, 1990). Most tellingly, the habitual withholding of the wajh al-shabah obliges the hearer to perform the mapping — precisely the productive labour that the constructed-analogy condition captures experimentally — and the concluding formulas of many amthāl (“if they only knew,” Q 29:41; “so that they may reflect,” Q 59:21) make that demand explicit. Finally, the discipline the literature requires — identifying where each analogy breaks down — is exactly what the exegetical tradition institutionalised in fixing the wajh al-shabah and delimiting each image’s admissible faces.

Three implications follow for teaching. First, teach the amthāl as mappings, not decorations: have learners identify the four pillars, articulate the unstated ground in their own words, extend the mapping, and locate its limits — the operations of Glynn’s Teaching-With-Analogies model, which the Qur’anic text, with its withheld wajh, is unusually well designed to support. Second, exploit the Qur’an’s own contrastive pairs (the stone and the garden under the same rain; the moths and the locusts of resurrection), which anticipate the multiple-analogies strategy recommended as the antidote to single-analogy misconception (Spiro et al., 1989). Third, cultivate metacognitive awareness of the device itself, beginning from Q 2:26 and Q 39:27 — for bilingual and young learners, this means explicit scaffolding of the comparison vocabulary and staged practice from near, concrete similes toward remote, composite ones.

Conclusion

Read as rhetoric, the Qur’anic tashbīh is a four-pillared figure whose selective suppression — above all of the ground of resemblance — makes it at once vivid and inexhaustible. Read as logic, the mathal is an identity of relations and an instantiation of the general in the graspable particular, adding no proposition but transforming the stated into the seen and felt. Read as pedagogy, it anticipates the conditions modern research identifies for effective analogical instruction: familiar sources, relational mappings, far-domain vividness, learner-performed construction, and disciplined awareness of limits. That convergence explains a fourteen-century-old datum — that these similitudes have taught, moved, and been remembered by every kind of hearer — and offers a design brief to anyone who teaches with them or through them. The mosquito of Q 2:26 was never too small; the analogy was never mere ornament.

References

The Noble Qur’an. English renderings consulted: Yusuf Ali; Saheeh International.

Al-Anṣārī, ʿU. (2010). Tashbīhāt al-Qur’ān al-Karīm wa-atharuhā fī al-tafsīr. Master’s thesis, Umm al-Qurā University.

Borrmann, K. (2021). Analogy in the Qur’an. Berlin (working paper).

Dabash, A., Meqdad, S. A., & AlShamali, N. (2023). Analogy in the Noble Qur’an — Sūrat al-Qamar as a model. Journal of Namibian Studies, 33, 2665–2676.

Duit, R. (1991). On the role of analogies and metaphors in learning science. Science Education, 75(6), 649–672.

Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science, 7, 155–170.

Glynn, S. M. (1991). Explaining science concepts: A Teaching-With-Analogies model. In S. M. Glynn, R. H. Yeany, & B. K. Britton (Eds.), The Psychology of Learning Science. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Guerra-Ramos, M. T. (2011). Analogies as tools for meaning making in elementary science education. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science & Technology Education, 7(1), 29–39.

Halpern, D. F., Hansen, C., & Riefer, D. (1990). Analogies as an aid to understanding and memory. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 298–305.

Al-Hāshimī, A. Jawāhir al-balāgha fī al-maʿānī wa-l-bayān wa-l-badīʿ. Beirut: al-Maktaba al-ʿAṣriyya.

Ibn ʿĀshūr, M. al-Ṭ. (1984). Al-Taḥrīr wa-l-tanwīr. Tunis: al-Dār al-Tūnisiyya li-l-Nashr.

Mason, L., & Sorzio, P. (1996). Analogical reasoning in restructuring scientific knowledge. European Journal of Psychology of Education, XI(1), 3–23.

Al-Rāzī, F. (2000). Mafātīḥ al-ghayb (al-Tafsīr al-Kabīr). Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī.

Spiro, R. J., Feltovich, P. J., Coulson, R. L., & Anderson, D. K. (1989). Multiple analogies for complex concepts. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and Analogical Reasoning (pp. 498–531). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Al-Ṭabarī, M. (2000). Jāmiʿ al-bayān fī ta’wīl al-Qur’ān. Mu’assasat al-Risāla.

Treagust, D., Duit, R., Joslin, P., & Lindauer, I. (1992). Science teachers’ use of analogies. International Journal of Science Education, 14(4), 413–422.

Ukoh, E. E., & Adejimi, A. S. (2018). Analogy and guided inquiry instructional strategies and students’ achievement in basic science in Lagos Metropolis, Nigeria. Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science, 26(1), 1–12.

Venville, G., & Treagust, D. (1996). The role of analogies in promoting conceptual change in biology. Instructional Science, 24, 295–320.

Note: References are compiled from the source documents analysed; edition details of classical works vary and should be verified against library records before formal publication.