The Meaning of Al-Karamah in the Qur'an: Toshihiko Izutsu's Semantic Analysis and Its Integration with Islamic Humanitarian Values

Abstract

This study examines the meaning of al-karamah in the Qur’an through Toshihiko Izutsu’s semantic approach and integrates the findings with humanitarian values in Islam. It responds to a persistent gap: the Qur’an grounds human nobility in divine endowment measured by piety, whereas social practice grades people by wealth, office, and lineage. This is a qualitative library research employing content analysis operated through Izutsu’s semantic stages, namely determining the focus word, tracing the basic meaning, syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, synchronic and diachronic reading, constructing the semantic field, and formulating the worldview. The corpus comprises forty-seven occurrences of the root k-r-m in forty-six verses across twenty-nine chapters, from which ten verses on human nobility are analysed. Three findings emerge. First, the basic meaning of the root is nobility inhering in substance and character, opposed to blameworthiness and humiliation. Second, its relational meaning unfolds in three patterns, namely nobility as divine endowment, as ethical obligation, and as contested claim; within the Qur’an the concept undergoes five shifts that form a worldview in which every person is ennobled at creation yet summoned to verify that nobility through piety. Third, this reading converges reciprocally with the notions of dignity, equality, and justice advanced by Kamali, Madjid, and Essack, indicating that Islamic humanitarian values are rooted in the Qur’an’s own lexical system rather than imported into it.