المعنى الاصطلاحي :

A science comprising a set of researches and branches of knowledge concerned with the Qur’an that help understand the Qur’an and extract its lessons. They are inseparably attached to the Qur’an.

الشرح المختصر :

"‘Uloom al-Qur’an" (sciences of the Qur’an) is a field of knowledge that combines different branches discussing everything related to the Qur’an, including "tajweed" (rules of sound recitation), methods of recitation, abrogation, etc. Some scholars counted these to be eighty branches. The scholars developed some standards for "‘uloom al-Qur’an": 1. The involved sciences must be (originally) known to the Arabs, so philosophy, logic, and other sciences that were not known to the Arabs are thus excluded. 2. The righteous predecessors should have shown interest in a given branch, and thus said something about it. 3. These sciences should serve as a means to understanding the Qur’an. These sciences originated during the time of the Prophet and his Companions. However, they were documented, as per branches, in different times. "‘Uloom al-Qur’an" can be divided into two categories: 1. Sciences originating from the Qur’an, and these are directly related with the Qur’an and arise only from it, such as the science of the occasions of revelation and its causes, the science of the methods of recitation, the science of the script and diacritics, etc. 2. Sciences associated with other sciences, and these are of two types: a) Sciences related to the Qur’an as a legal text, such as the science of abrogation, the science of the general and the specific, the science of the absolute and the restricted, and the science of the precise and the ambiguous. b) Sciences related to the Qur’an as an Arabic text, such as the science of parsing the Qur’an and the science of rhetoric.