ABSTRACT
The Our'an is riddled with references to the signs of God; in this sense it may be described as a semiotician's paradise par excellence.2 And it is clear from the above quotation that Islamic semiosis has both a wide external and internal aspect. Yet for all the apparent clarity of those signs throughout the text of the Qur'an, the general inadequacy of language about the Maker of those signs remains. It is a lament with an old history and one common to the three great monotheistic religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Aquinas recognized it when he stressed that 'in actual fact the name "God" is incommunicable rather as we said of the word "Sun".'3 The problem has been much reiterated and rehearsed by modem scholars. Paul Ricoeur, for example, adumbrates the whole dilemma of theological discourse in a nutshell:
To impute a discourse common to God and to his creatures would be to destroy divine transcendence; on the other hand, assuming total incommunicability of meanings from one level to the other would condemn one to utter agnosticism. 4
The doctrine of analogy, espoused by Aquinas, was designed as an attempt at a way out of the quandary.' For Kornelis Miskotte 'Being, causality, and process (in the sense of the working-out of givens) are inadequate terms for God and his acts';6 while, nonetheless, for Northrop Frye 'the word "God", however great its number of referents, is practically a linguistic
requisite for metonymic thinking." We cannot, in other words, avoid the use of such terms.
