Change the definition of the words and you change their meaning. And in authoritarian and totalitarian cultures - those where freedom of inquiry and expression are severely restricted - the meaning of words is controlled by those who exercise power, not those who originally wrote or uttered them, right?
And since Arabic is a high-context language it isn't even enough to know the meaning of the words to understand the communication that was originally intended, right?
Therefore the quran is infinitely malleable by tyrants and every other work, no matter how it enhances the human soul, may be trashed at will, right?
Thank you for your kind response, dear solomon. You have raised a vitally important point about human language. Human language is nothing more than words and meanings. Many words in a human language have same or similar meanings as well as the very same word can have many different meanings. This is an accepted fact and anyone can verify it for oneself.
You are absolutely right that since this is the problem with human language so we human beings define words for our uses so that they serve our purposes.
In case of the quran this does not cause any problems. Why not? It is because the quran is word of God. God has used human language to express his own thoughts in order to guide humanity.
By asking certain relevant questions we can arrive at a definite conclusion. For example, why do human beings need guidance from God? What the guidance of God has to be about? By asking these like questions in a way we are gradually building up a standard or criterion or benchmark or yardstick for proper interpretation of the quranic text.
You see God has created each and everything for some purpose which only and only he knows and unless he himself tells us that purpose, we could never know it for definite. The question therefore is what is that purpose and does the quran talk about it or explains it or should it? The answer is yes it does. Otherwise it could not be from God.
If the quran states the purpose for which God ended up creating this world then he also has to let human beings know what they need to think and do so that the purpose for which God created everything could become fulfilled. Moreover why this is important for human beings only to know? It is because God has created all things and he has already programmed them to various degrees from the most programmed to the least programmed. This is why things that are fully programmed by God function that way and things which are partially programmed function the way they are supposed to.
Human beings are programmed to self program themselves through direct interaction with things as well as to learn through help of revelation from God. This is why human beings think and do things very differently from all other things or living things.
None can learn anything at all about revelation of God unless one first learns things by interacting with existing things within reach of one's senses. This is why anyone who does not have reasonable understanding of real world realities cannot understand the quranic text correctly at all.
This is why to understand the quran properly one has to first come up with a proper way for understanding the quranic text properly. The proper way for understanding the quran properly is the criterion for judging whether one has understood the quranic text properly or not.
This is why the only base of deen of islam is the quran as stand alone book. Once the quran is understood properly from then on the quran itself becomes the sole criterion for judging all other information by all other sources of information whether any particular piece of information in other sources is true or false or right or wrong or beneficial or harmful etc etc.
I have explained a lot of things about the quran and deen of islam in my posts in my provided links here and there on this forum. May be you will find them helpful in this regard.
regards and all the best.