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Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of tafsīr in

Arabic: A History of the Book Approach
Article in Journal of Qur anic Studies · October 2010

DOI: 10.3366/jqs.2010.0103
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Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of
tafsīr in Arabic: A History of the
Book Approach
Walid A. Saleh
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
Since all the extensive histories of the tafsīr genre published so far are in Arabic,
a close analysis of the historiography of these works is a desideratum. In this article
I will argue that there are three major categories of historiography, the traditional
Ashʿarī, the Salafī, and the modernist. Identifying these camps is essential if we desire
to understand the manner in which tafsīr studies has been approached so far, since the
proponents of all three have produced, and continue to produce, the editions of tafsīr
works that are the basis of most histories in Western academia. It will also allow us to
investigate the history of the all-present term ‘al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr’ which has come
to play a key role in the categorisation of tafāsīr. Charting the historiography of tafsīr,
moreover, is here undertaken in conjunction with discussion of the history of
publications of editions of tafsīr in the Arab world. In other words, a history of the
editions themselves as eventful milestones in a historiography of tafsīr is the primary
means through which I attempt to understand this selfsame historiography.
Histories of tafsīr in the Arab World
The historiography of tafsīr in the Arab world is not only rich but is also intimately
connected to the cultural battles of the modern period: it is in it that we can document
the most decisive conflicts between the different intellectual currents active in the
Arab world. As such the study of the history of modern tafsīr historiography in the
Arab world is itself an essential, illuminating endeavour in unravelling the battles over
the Qur’an.
There are at least five works in Arabic that are worth discussing here in detail
which represent the currents I have identified (i) Muḥammad al-Dhahabī’s, al-Tafsīr
Journal of Qur’anic Studies 12 (2010): 6–40

Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/E146535911000094X
# Centre of Islamic Studies, SOAS
www.eupjournals.com/jqs
Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of tafsīr in Arabic 7
wa’l-mufassirūn,1 (ii) the al-Tafsīr: maʿālim ḥayātihi – manhajuhu al-yawm of

Amīn al-Khūlī,2 (iii) al-Naḥw wa-kutub al-tafsīr by Ibrāhīm Rufayda,3 (iv) Ibn
ʿĀshūr’s al-Tafsīr wa-rijāluhu4 and (v) al-Fihris al-shāmil li’l-turāth al-ʿArabī al-
Islāmī al-makhṭūṭ, ʿulūm al-Qurʾān: makhṭūṭāt al-tafsīr.5 The first is the well-known
work by Muḥammad al-Dhahabī, al-Tafsīr wa’l-mufassirūn. This three-volume
history is the earliest and most influential survey of tafsīr in the twentieth century,
which, like many modern studies on tafsīr, was originally written as a dissertation,
submitted to al-Azhar University in 1946. Al-Dhahabī’s work is extensive and has yet
to be supplanted, however, it is more a catalogue and survey of works than a well
thought out historical conception of the genre of tafsīr, since no causal connections are
made between the various exegetes or their methods. Its understanding of the history
of the genre demonstrated is, moreover, decidedly theological, basing itself on the
medieval exegetical hermeneutical discourses of al-Zarkashī and al-Suyūṭī, through
the latter’s work al-Itqān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān. One is offered the exegetes in snapshots
rather than as part of a historical narrative of developments and ruptures. Far more
significant an element in al-Dhahabī’s conceptual outlook is the influence of Ibn
Taymiyya’s (d. 728/1328) theory of the history of tafsīr, which supplied the
philosophical underpinnings of al-Dhahabī’s work. This, then, is a Salafī history
which reaffirms the revelatory and transcendent nature of the Qur’an.
Al-Dhahabī divides the history of the genre into three periods: ‘the Prophet and the
Companions’; ‘the Successors’; and ‘the Age of Writing’ (ʿaṣr al-tadwīn) – not a
very helpful division given that the third period is 1,200 years long! While he offers a
chronological history in his treatment of the first two periods, he moves into a
thematic presentation in the third, preferring to use tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr (‘tradition-
based interpretation’) and tafsīr bi’l-raʾy (‘deductive or rational interpretation’) as the
organising principle of his work. This categorisation of tafsīr is not only decidedly
Sunnī (of the Salafī type), hence ideological, but it is also without analytical value.
Tafsīr bi’l-raʾy is further divided into two categories; the permissible kind (al-tafsīr
bi’l-raʾy al-jāʾiz) and the arbitrary heretical kind (tafsīr bi’l-raʾy al-madhmūm or
tafsīr al-firaq al-mubtadiʿa), two value judgements which stem from a modern Salafī
sensibility, since many works damned as heretical were popular in medieval Sunnī
circles. Al-Dhahabī’s work has no qualms about its staunchly Salafī outlook.
Volume one is preserved for what one could call approved Sunnī authors and
methods. Al-Dhahabī first discusses eighteen Sunnī exegetes, eight of whom are
banded under the salutary rubric al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr, these being al-Ṭabarī
(d. 311/923), al-Samarqandī (d. 375/985), al-Thaʿlabī (d. 427/1035), al-Baghawī
(d. 516/1122), Ibn ʿAṭiyya (d. 542/1148), Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1372), al-Thaʿālibī
(d. 875/1470) and al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505, here as the author of al-Durr al-manthūr).
The other ten Sunnī exegetes are banded together under the rubric al-tafsīr bi’l-raʾy
al-jāʾiz (‘permissible reasoned interpretation’), these being Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī
8 Journal of Qur’anic Studies
(d. 604/1207), al-Bayḍāwī (d. 791/1388), al-Nasafī (d. 710/1310), al-Khāzin (d.
725/1324), Abū Ḥayyān al-Gharnāṭī (d. 745/1344), al-Naysābūrī (d. 728/1328),
al-Suyūṭī (here as the author of Tafsīr al-Jalālayn), al-Khaṭīb al-Sharbīnī (d. 977/
1569), Abū’l-Suʿūd (d. 982/1574) and al-Ālūsī (d. 1270/1854). The last part of this
first volume is dedicated to authors who were part of what al-Dhahabī considered
al-tafsīr bi’l-raʾy al-madhmūm, or ‘unacceptable reasoned interpretation’. These turn
out to be Muʿtazilī authors who were either Sunnī or Shīʿī. Al-Dhahabī includes three
exegetes under this rubric: al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 415/1025), al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā
(d. 436/1044) and al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144). Here al-Zamakhsharī is ostracised
formally after being the centre of the Sunnī curriculum.
The second volume contains sections covering the Shīʿī, Ṣūfī, legal, philosophical and
modern interpretive traditions. The section dealing with the legal interpretive tradition
contains the only markedly Sunnī material in this volume, otherwise we have a neatly
divided history: volume one is for Sunnī approved works and volume two is for
mostly non-Sunnī works. The authors discussed in the Twelver Shīʿī sections are: the
author of Mirʾāt al-anwār wa-mishkāt al-asrār (who is not clearly identified – he is
actually Abū’l-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad Ṭāhir ʿĀmilī, d. 1137/1725), al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī
(d. 260/873), al-Ṭabrisī (d. 548/1154), al-Fayḍ al-Kāshī (d. 1091/1680), Shubbar
(d. 1239/1824) and Sulṭān Muḥammad (d. 1909). This is a remarkable coverage from
a Sunnī scholar of the Shīʿī exegetical tradition, traditionally not the done thing. The
selection is dictated by what Shīʿī material was available in print in Egypt, and the
tone is condemnatory, but there is at least an attempt at giving the reader a summary of
the hermeneutical principles of this tradition. There are also chapters on Ismāʿīlī
and Bahāʾī hermeneutical traditions, although the quality of these chapters is
unsatisfactory, one on Zaydī tafsīr (which is significant since it covers the work of
al-Shawkānī (d. 1250/1834)), and a chapter on Khārijī hermeneutics which remains
unique to this day, since it covers the Qur’an commentary of Muḥammad b. Yūsif
Aṭṭafayyash (d. 1332/1914). (I have not seen this massive work discussed anywhere
before, although it is the most extensive Khārijī Ibāḍī commentary we have.)
The Ṣūfī tradition is also covered extensively, indeed the authors covered here are the
most important representatives of the Ṣūfī interpretive tradition (al-Tustarī (d. 283/
896), al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021), Rūzbihān al-Baqlī (d. 606/1209), the Kubrawī tradition
including Najm al-Dīn al-Dāya (d. 654/1256) and ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla al-Simnānī (d. 736/
1336) and the commentary attributed to Ibn al-ʿArabī), and the coverage is such that
this chapter has withstood the passage of time. In the section on philosophical
interpretations al-Dhahabī discusses al-Fārābī, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā and Ibn Sīnā, and
includes another chapter on classical medieval scientific interpretations of the Qur’an.
There is also a large chapter on the legal interpretative tradition, the aḥkām al-Qurʾān
genre, which includes a discussion of Sunnī (al-Jaṣṣāṣ, d. 370/980; al-Kiyā al-Harrāsī,
d. 504/1110; Ibn al-ʿArabī al-Mālikī, d. 543/1148; and al-Qurṭubī, d. 671/1272), Shīʿī
(al-Miqdād al-Suyūrī, d. 826/1423) and Zaydī (Yūsuf b. Aḥmad al-Yamānī al-Zaydī,

d. 832/1429) scholars. The modern interpretative tradition is divided into four types:
the scientific (the Qur’an taken to contain material that anticipates and predicts the
findings and discoveries of the scientific revolution; as a representative of this trend
al-Dhahabī discusses the work of al-Ṭanṭāwī al-Jawharī), the sectarian (namely in the
form of a list of Shīʿī modern exegetes which hardly goes beyond naming them), the
blasphemous (which discusses the confiscated, and thus unavailable, work al-Hidāya
wa’l-ʿirfān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān bi’l-Qurʾān, and al-Dhahabī deigns to name the author
who goes unnamed – he is actually Muḥammad Abū Zayd), the literary social (which
covers the traditional reformist school in tafsīr: the school of Muḥammad ʿAbduh
and his students and followers Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā and Muḥammad Muṣṭafā
al-Murāghī). Al-Dhahabī stands firmly against the reformist trend in its attempt to
bring the Qur’an in line with modernity. His history of the modern period is also a
selective one, neglecting to mention the many incidents of book banning in Egypt that
were a result of Azharī opposition to the literary approach to the Qur’an pioneered in
the Arabic department of Cairo University (Fuʾād al-Awwal University before the
Egyptian Revolution).
The third volume of al-Tafsīr, which came out posthumously, contains al-Dhahabī’s
teaching notes from his years in Baghdad. The significance of this volume is that it
sheds light on the personal interests of this Sunnī scholar, who seems to have
developed a fascination with non-Sunnī sects. However, in itself, it adds little to the
two previous volumes.
Even this quick survey of al-Dhahabī’s work clearly shows the massive effort
undertaken by this scholar in his attempt to give a comprehensive picture of the genre
of tafsīr. The coverage of Shīʿī hermeneutics is remarkable regardless of the quality of
the analysis done in these chapters; the Islamic hermeneutical tradition is gathered
together in al-Dhahabī’s work in its entirety. Sunnism had never cared before to offer
others this platform. Clearly the aim was comprehensiveness. Al-Dhahabī utilised not
only printed sources but also unpublished works, thus offering the first detailed survey
of tafsīr works in the modern period (granted this was clearly a step influenced by the
modern Arabic nationalist movement which was unearthing Arabic classics and
publishing them, the first to consider unpublished works as part of their history of
tafsīr was actually Amīn al-Khūlī, for more on whom see below). To give just two
examples out of many unpublished works that were discussed by al-Dhababī in the
Tafsīr, he was one of the first to address al-Thaʿlabī’s al-Kashf wa’l-bayān; he also
gave an extensive description of the work of Ibn ʿAṭiyya (d. 542/1148), an author who
was highlighted by Amīn al-Khūlī already (this was before the publication of Ibn
ʿAṭiyya’s work in the 1970s). The chapter on Ṣūfī hermeneutics, to give one further
example, utilised three manuscript works, making this chapter still relevant 70 years
after its publication.
Al-Dhababī’s recourse to such a large number of exegetes remains unmatched in the

field. Some of the authors he discussed remain, to this day, untouched (whether their
works are edited or still in manuscript form). The richness of the details is what makes
this work a classic, but it has serious limitations; it lacks a vision or a historical
understanding of the development of the genre, imposing a Salafī paradigm that was
never reflective of the historical developments of the genre; it fails to situate tafsīr in
the larger picture of the Islamic religious tradition; moreover, it is silent about the
contributions of tafsīr to the Islamic intellectual tradition. It fails also to connect
the various currents that were shaping the hermeneutical Islamic paradigms, their
competing agendas and their complementary nature. This, however, does not negate
the reference nature of this work, which remains the primer of the field.
The real significance and impact of al-Dhahabī’s work was and is, however,
ideological. The work solidified the hold of the Ibn Taymiyya-influenced discourse
on the modern Arabic and Islamic historiography of tafsīr. From now on the ‘Ibn
Taymiyyan’ paradigm was the prism through which tafsīr’s history was perceived by
most scholars working in the Arab world. The battle had been fought and won, and the
modernist literary approach to the Qur’an and its history had suffered a retreat at the
hands of the Azharī establishments from which it has yet to recover.
The story of the rise to eminence of Salafī ideology began in 1936 in Damascus when
the Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr, a hitherto inconsequential work by Ibn Taymiyya,
was published by the Ḥanbalī muftī of the city. This publication was one
manifestation of the modern Salafī resurgence which made of Ibn Taymiyya and
his understanding of the Islamic religious tradition a corner stone of its program. Ibn
Taymiyyan hermeneutical theory demanded that the interpretations of the Salaf, or
early generations of Muslims, be accorded sole legitimacy in interpreting the Qur’an.
The justification for such restriction of exegetical options was the claim raised by Ibn
Taymiyya that this early corpus was Prophetic in origin. A dubious claim to say the
least, and when the theory was first propagated no exegete worth his salt bothered
with it. The situation was radically different on the eve of modernity in the Islamic
world, when his call found an unexpected resonance that afforded this theory a
currency unmatched before. It took less than a decade before this booklet, and the
theory it expounded, became an unstoppable force on the hermeneutical level.6
One of the major aims of the Salafī movement was the reclamation of the Qur’an from
the scholastic Ashʿarī Sunnī tradition (the second historiographic current in the Arab
world). This was accomplished through a concerted effort to reposition the Qur’an
commentaries of al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Kathīr and (less so) that of al-Baghawī, as the centre
of the tafsīr enterprise – a very late enactment of the program proposed in the
Muqaddima of Ibn Taymiyya. This meant a displacement of the al-Bayḍāwī – al-
Zamakhsharī – al-Rāzī triad from the position at the centre of tafsīr seminary
education it had occupied since the seventh Hijrī century. The battle was part of
an internal Islamic struggle over hermeneutics being fought by three competing
paradigms: the scholastic, previously Azharī, hermeneutical approach of al-
Zamakhsharī – al-Bayḍāwī; the new Salafī Ibn Taymiyyan approach which
eventually swept over the Azharī establishment; and the literary nationalist
approach. Each was attempting to affirm its understanding of the Qur’an through
its hermeneutical approach to it. The (fourth) modernist trend represented by
Muḥammad ʿAbduh, which was picked up by the secular Arab nationalist modernists
of Fuʾād al-Awwal University, lacked sufficent religious credentials and stood little
chance to influence the battle.
The Modernist Camp and its Struggle with the Salafī Camp
To appreciate the sweeping nature of the victory of this reiteration of a staunchly

Salafī hermeneutical approach to the Qur’an, and consequently to an understanding of
what tafsīr is about, one only has to read the now unread study al-Tafsīr: maʿālim
ḥayātihi – manhajuhu al-yawm of Amīn al-Khūlī, the leading proponent of the
modernist literary nationalist approach to the Qur’an. Al-Khūlī published his history
of tafsīr in 1933 as an entry for the Arabic translation of the first edition of the
Encyclopaedia of Islam, as a direct response to his displeasure with the entry on tafsīr
which was in the English original, and it was later reprinted as a book in 1944. Solidly
historical and analytical, the little booklet is indistinguishable in its method and
approach from that of modern Western scholarship on tafsīr. Yet it is also more than
that: his study was a program to reclaim the hermeneutical privilege to interpret
the Qur’an from the traditional camp, and was written with full knowledge of Ignaz
Goldziher’s classic work on tafsīr. Al-Khūlī’s translation of the German title as
ittijāhāt al-tafsīr (‘directions’) clearly shows that it was a direct translation from
German, and not dependent on the later Arabic translations which used a different
title. His criticisms of Goldziher’s work were incisive and motivated by real academic
concerns regarding the scope of Goldziher’s conclusions and his method rather than
any discomfort out of religious sensibilities. It is also blistering in its attack on the
Salafī camp which was trying to shove the Salafī paradigm down the collective throats
of Arab intellectuals.
Al-Khūlī’s was an Arabic nationalist scholarship claiming the Qur’an away from the
religious heritage of Islam, and determined to turn the Qur’an into a classic – the
classic – for a great Arab newly secular culture (al-kitāb al-ʿArabiyya al-akbar). This
was clearly an example of an attempt to define the Qur’an as a cultural literary work,
rather than as a religious document. Al-Khūlī’s booklet was thus a manifesto: the
Qur’an was a literary product and a literary approach was the only modern approach
to the Qur’an. This was not to be, however. The Azharī establishment, now turned
Salafī, was far more adept at keeping the Qur’an as its exclusive prerogative.
The Qur’an was repositioned squarely in a Salafī paradigm where the hermeneutical
tools were unequivocally restricted to a ḥadīth-inherited mode: a privileging of the
ancestral voice above and beyond any other voice.
It is remarkable how different the positions of al-Khūlī (an Azharī shaykh by training)
were from those of the Azharī al-Dhahabī (al-Dhahabī by the way was keenly aware
of al-Khūlī’s booklet and he cited it in his work). Al-Khūlī could hardly contain his
disdain for the attempt to present tafsīr in the language of the medieval scholars;
the methods of the old traditions were hardly useful now, undertaking tafsīr the old
way would bring nothing to life. He was willing to use the medieval sources only to
point out how contradictory and unsatisfactory the positions of his opponents were.
Al-Tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr (al-Khūlī actually used ‘tafsīr al-riwāya’, the more common
term before tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr became standard) was as dubiously fraudulent as the
old authorities have been telling us, it was nothing but the personal opinion of the
early exegetes themselves and had no divine backing; al-Khūlī enjoyed recounting
how untrustworthy all the authorities of early tafsīr were, thus undermining any claim
to legitimacy for inherited tafsīr material. He mocked the Azharī scholars (ashyākh al-
Azhar, using a sarcastic plural for the word shaykh instead of the more common
shuyūkh) for their effort to expunge Isrāʾīliyyāt from the tafsīr corpus. Isrāʾīliyyāt are
a slight danger (‘amr yasīr al-khaṭar’), he sardonically reassures them. What needs
to be undertaken with Isrāʾīliyyāt instead is the implementation of a comprehensive
comparative religious approach that documents the process of mutual interaction
between religions. These two positions adopted by al-Khūlī are just a few examples
which illustrate the unbridgeable gap between the secularist nationalist understanding
of the heritage of tafsīr and the traditional Azharīs.
The victory of the Ibn Taymiyyan paradigm should not be understood as a victory
of the traditionalist camp, either. On the contrary, the scholastic hermeneutical
traditionalist heritage was actually the first casualty of this realignment. The
Salafī hermeneutical paradigm was historically a fringe current in Islam, always on
the periphery and intellectually isolated. This was fundamentally an anti-
scholastic tradition, puritanical in its zeal, both exhilarating and liberating but also
severely limiting. It has little sympathy with bulwarks of the tafsīr tradition such as
al-Rāzī or al-Zamakhsharī. Indeed, exponents of the Salafī paradigm remained
puzzled and unable to understand how the Sunnī establishment, represented through
the madrasa curriculum, enshrined the Muʿtazilī al-Zamakhsharī and his imitator
al-Bayḍāwī. It is of course ironic that the dismantling of the madrasa system of
higher education meant that a reshuffle of the curriculum was effected much more
easily than would have been the case had the madrasa curriculum developed
internally. Instead of the modernists winning out, the more puritanical mode won
the day.
Tafsīr historiography in the Arab world was conscious of the latest developments in
Orientalism and soon incorporated Goldziher’s classical study on tafsīr as part of its
corpus (his German study was translated twice into Arabic, although it would not be
translated into English until 2006). Modern Arabic historiography of tafsīr is thus a
complicated affair and reflects the deep rifts in the Islamic religious tradition on the
eve of modernity. On the one hand the seminary system (whether the madāris which
were functioning in Istanbul until 1924, or are in Egypt or India active still today)
championed and utilised the scholastic commentaries, namely those of al-Bayḍāwī,
al-Zamkhasharī and al-Rāzī and the many supercommentaries that were used to teach
them. Hence the first works to be published in the Islamic world were these
commentaries and their ḥawāshī (‘supercommentaries’). The publication of this
corpus thus remains the strongest expression of the old mainstream scholastic tradition
of tafsīr. The sheer weight of the tradition was impossible to ignore, and the tradition
spoke a hermeneutically scholastic language that stood diametrically opposed to a
restriction on the prerogatives of an exegete in the name of ancestral inherited
tradition. Almost every title in the tafsīr corpus belongs to this scholastic Ashʿarī
tradition. To go back to tradition was to fall back into the fold of the scholastic system.
This will prove to be the most interesting complicating factor in the relationship of the
Salafī movement with its beloved Islamic past. As the Salafī movement acquired the
trappings of higher education, it found itself the new champion of turāth, heritage, and
embarked on a program of issuing editions of this inheritance, but this time it was an
Islamic heritage, and not an Arabic heritage as had been previously championed by
the Arab nationalist movement. Yet, to revive the scholastic past one was to revive an
opponent’s literature: the Salafī movement is falling into a trap of its own making and
fissures in its edifice are already showing.
The Modernist movement of historiography continues to be relevant through the

Arabic departments of Arab universities. One of the major works of this movement is
al-Naḥw wa-kutub al-tafsīr by Ibrāhīm Rufayda. This two-volume study of the history
of grammar and Qur’an commentaries was the first work to offer a meaningful
periodisation of the history of tafsīr. It divides tafsīr historically into six periods which
(although I am uncomfortable with) I still regard as the only serious option we have so
far. The history of Rufayda (totalling 1,500 pages) is the most detailed study of the
Sunnī grammatical scholastic tradition we have (he discusses only one Shīʿī Qur’an
commentary), and it attempts to follow the history of tafsīr through the lens of the
grammatical approach to the Qur’an. Like al-Dhahabī, Rufayda consulted many
manuscript copies of Qur’an commentaries, thus making his history an indispensable
tool for scholars of tafsīr. The main feature of this work is that it does not forget the
role of the ḥāshiya as part of the medieval scholastic tradition of tafsīr – although it
offers no systematic study of this subgenre. The real significance of Rufayda’s work is
the fact that it is not a Salafī motivated enterprise, rather it represents a continuation of
the Arabic nationalist historical approach to the Islamic heritage in which the non-
Islamic elements were emphasised. This work deserves to be a major reference tool in
tafsīr studies, but so far has met with no recognition whatsoever.
The authors discussed by Rufayda are: Abū ʿUbayda (d. 210/825), al-Farrāʾ (d. 207/
822), al-Zajjāj (d. 311/923), Abū ʿAlī al-Fārisī (d. 377/987), al-Naḥḥās (d. 338/950),
Ibn Khālawayh (d. 370/980), Ibn al-Jinnī (d. 392/1002), al-Rummānī (d. 384/994), al-
Naqqāsh (d. 351/962), al-Ṭabarī, al-Ḥawfī (d. 430/1039), al-Mahdawī (d. 440/1048),
al-Wāḥidī (d. 468/1076), al-Zamakhsharī, Ibn ʿAṭiyya, al-Ṭabrisī, al-Rāzī, al-Qurṭubī,
al-Kawāshī (d. 680/1281), al-Bayḍāwī, al-Nasafī, al-Iskandarī (d. 741/1341), Abū
Ḥayyān al-Gharnāṭī, al-Sīwāsī (d. 860/1456), al-Suyūṭī, al-Thaʿālibī al-Jazāʾirī
(d. 875/1470), al-Kharrūbī al-Ṭarābulsī (d. 963/1556), al-Khaṭīb al-Shirbīnī (d. 977/
1569), Abū’l-Suʿūd (d. 951/1355), al-Khafājī (d. 1069/1659), al-Karkhī (d. 1006/
1598), al-Jamal al-ʿUjaylī (d. 1204/1790), al-Shawkānī, al-Ālūsī, Muḥammad ʿAbduh
(d. 1323/1905) and al-Qāsimī (d. 1332/1914). This is an impressive list to say the
least.
There are two significant insights from Rufayda’s historical analysis that need to be
emphasised here. First, he considers the work of Abū Ḥayyān al-Gharnāṭī to be the
apex of the genre of grammatical tafsīr. Given the underlying presumption of his
approach, one can easily understand this assessment to mean that Abū Ḥayyān was
also the summation of the genre. The choice of Abū Ḥayyān highlights the complexity
of issuing any historical judgements on tafsīr. Depending on what trend one is
investigating, one ends up with a different trajectory: the interwoven nature of tafsīr,
with its many schools and approaches to the Qur’an, meant that the tradition was
developing parallel trajectories that intersected, competed, or fully disregarded each
other. Rufayda’s second insight is that he starts the modern period with al-Shawkānī,
a very perceptive, and until then unheard of, understanding of modernity in the Arab
world. These two historical assessments are rather profound, and they cannot be
dismissed offhand. Furthermore, Rufayda offers one of most detailed studies of tafsīr
we have so far. In this sense the modernist movement continues to be of profound
relevance to the historiography of tafsīr in the Arab world despite the fact that it has
lost the cultural battle.
One of the major developments in the modern history of tafsīr has been the concerted
effort orchestrated by the Salafī movement to revive the marginal tafsīr works of the
ḥadīth-oriented kind. The publication of al-Ṭabarī in 1905 was to prove a remarkable
gift to the Salafī movement, not because this was a ḥadīth-based tafsīr work, but
because it was claimed as part of this movement (willy-nilly). Al-Ṭabarī however was
never Salafī enough for the Salafīs, it is Ibn Kathir who will be the corner stone of this
revival effort. That Qur’an commentaries stood at the centre of a new political
realignment in the modern Middle East is easily illustrated by the involvement of the
royal houses of the Middle East in the sponsoring and publication of certain
commentaries that reflected their ideological outlook. The starkest example of this
came with the publication of Ibn Kathīr’s Qur’an commentary in a sumptuous edition
in 1924 by no less an editor than Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā with funds from no one
else but the now aspiring King of the Hijāz, al-Imām ʿAbd Allāh b. Saʿūd. What is of
profound cultural significance about this edition is that the typesetting is decidedly
modern: this is not the old Bulāq crammed printing of a Qur’an commentary for
the eyes of the seminarians of the madrasa system. This was a luxuriant edition, a
nine-volume print, the first transformation of a tafsīr work into a mainstream work.
Al-Ṭabarī has to wait until the 1950s to be accorded this honour.
That the prince of a newly forming state should have the money to send to an
Egyptian scholar to print a Qur’an commentary so lavishly should give us pause.7
This remarkable detail is baffling unless we understand the central role of Ibn Kathīr
in the Salafī enterprise. The sumptuous nine-volume edition of Ibn Kathīr was not
matched till 1939 when the Egyptian royal house would enter the competition – al-
Rāzī, the bulwark of the madrasa tafsīr curriculum, gets the honour earlier in 1932
when a thirty-volume edition of his tafsīr came out (instead of the eight-volume or
six-volume editions of the nineteenth century).
When the article ‘Tafsīr’ was written for the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam
(the same article that was too short and too perfunctory for the taste of its Arab
translators, who chose Amīn al-Khūlī to write the entry for the Arabic edition), the
author Bernard Carra de Vaux had this to say about what was then the most popular
tafsīr in the Islamic world: ‘[t]he commentary of al-Baiḍāwī (d. 685) is the most
popular and is the one taught in the schools: it has fixed the beliefs of the pious
Muslim as regard the interpretation of the sacred book and has been several times
annotated.’ This reality did not survive for long. When one now surveys the Islamic
world and tries to ascertain what is the most popular Qur’an commentary, it becomes
clear that it is Ibn Kathīr’s commentary that is now playing the role that was once
played by al-Bayḍāwī’s. Even al-Ṭabarī is unable to compete with Ibn Kathīr. Ibn
Kathīr’s tafsīr is so popular that one tends to forget how recent his ascent was in the
Islamic world.
The only problem that the Salafī movement has faced is the fact that of the hundreds
of Qur’an commentaries that were written during the long history of Islam only a few
belonged to, or passed the muster of, Salafī demands. However, the limitations of the
Salafī program due to the scarce number of tafsīr works that were truly ḥadīth-
oriented would not diminish the hold that this movement had on hermeneutical
developments in modern Muslim lands. It made up for this lack by being the most
active theoretically, thus enforcing a sort of complete hegemony on hermeneutical
theorisation. This was thanks to the crisp language of Ibn Taymiyya’s Muqaddima,
the theoretical sway of which is such that all works now are measured through its lens.
The failure of an exegete, or his success, is measured by how far he has adhered to the
Ibn Taymiyyan hermeneutical paradigm.
The Beleaguered Ashʿarī Traditional Camp
The response of the scholastic madrasa hermeneutical tradition was late in coming –
if only since there was always the confusion that the Salafī movement was doing the
bidding of the traditionalist. The traditionalists had already lost their royal patron,
represented in King Fūʾād al-Awwāl and his son Fārūq. The Egyptian royal house not
only saw to it to publish the now textus receptus of the Qur’an, but also oversaw the
publication of the Qur’an commentary of al-Qurṭubī in what was the most exquisite
edition of any Qur’an commentary of the twentieth century, a twenty-volume edition
which came out in 1935. The Kings of Egypt were not going to be outdone by the
upstarts of Najd. The theoretical, and I would say the more cogent, response from the
traditionalist camp, however, came in 1966, rather late in the story. It was the
publication of the small booklet al-Tafsīr wa-rijāluhu by the muftī of Tunisia, al-Fāḍil
b. ʿĀshūr that showed the resilience of this previously mainstream bastion of Islamic
scholastic tradition. I have already discussed at length the significance of this work
and it suffices here to repeat that al-Bayḍāwī and the scholastic supercommentary was
put at the centre of the history of tafsīr by Ibn ʿĀshūr.8 He, like the tradition from
which he came, dismissed Ibn Taymiyya as a marginal figure: the madrasa never
endorsed Ibn Taymiyya, and this upstart was not to issue judgement on the madrasa.
The traditionalist camp, having lost the battle with the Salafīs, has history on its side,
however. Since most tafsīr works belong to this tradition its voice is impossible to
silence. Nowadays, with the Salafī movement becoming entrenched in university
systems in the Arab world, it has become the champion of the texts that belong to their
opponents, the Ashʿarī school. Every new medieval Qur’an commentary that is
published is a reaffirmation of the mainstream Islamic exegetical heritage, which
happens to be the Ashʿarī tradition.
The works I have discussed here represent a rich tradition of engagement with the
history of tafsīr. It is clear that we in the West will not have anything to match these
works anytime soon, however this rich historiography is marginalised when we write
histories of tafsīr. The real problem is that these works are not part of the Western
academic history of tafsīr. They remain, even when mentioned, inconsequential to our
understanding of the development of the genre. The gulf between the study of tafsīr in
the West and the Islamic world is rendering the field of tafsīr parochial; we utilise, and
as it were consume, the editions from the Arab world while pretending that the source
is inconsequential; there are thus two major centres of narratives for tafsīr, one (in the
West) pretending to be academic and independent from the other, the other (in the
Islamic world) which has ceased to care as to what is happening in the West – there
was a time that the Arab world was keenly interested in Orientalists and their works.
We in the West cannot continue to neglect this rich historiography, especially since
we will not be able to produce sweeping histories of tafsīr anytime soon. As far as
tafsīr studies is concerned the real developments are happening in the Islamic world,
where a concerted effort is being made to publish this heritage. The underlying
haughty indifference with which we have treated the cultural production of the Arab
world in tafsīr is based on the presumption that the analytical tools of the secondary
literature there is of such inferiority that one can afford to disregard it. This is also an
unfounded presumption – conceptually the Arab world has not been lacking. We have
to remember that the Arab world translated Goldziher’s study on tafsīr in 1944,
70 years before it would be translated into English, and many of the leading scholars
who are working on tafsīr in the Anglo world have had no access to this classic of
tafsīr studies till very recently. As such, the Arab world was far more informed of
what the West was doing than the other way round. Far more significantly, the Arab
world is not obsessed with origins the way Western academia is, and hence tafsīr
studies in the Arab world has moved beyond the formative period and is more
engaged with the documented period.
The last work I would like to discuss, the fifth, is not a history work but a reference
work which belongs to the Traditional Ashʿarī camp. Though this is not a history
proper, it is actually the most important history we have of tafsīr as a genre. Al-Fihris
al-shāmil li’l-turāth al-ʿArabī al-Islāmī al-makhṭūṭ, ʿulūm al-Qurʾān: makhṭūṭāt
al-tafsīr is a detailed registry of all the titles of tafsīr works and the corresponding
extant manuscripts available in the world, based on the catalogues of manuscript
collections. As far as tafsīr studies go this is the reference tool. This work has played a
double role in my own work. It has become the first reference tool I use when
assessing the significance of an exegete and his legacy. The registry, because of its
chronological and quantitative data, allows me to make historical judgements not
possible otherwise. Thus, for example, when you realise that there are hundreds of
manuscript copies of al-Baghawī’s Qur’an commentary, one has to asses the meaning
of this number, and the significance of al-Baghawī in the history of tafsīr. The same
applies to al-Ṭabarī or any other exegete. Second, this reference work is a reminder
to me of the limitation of our knowledge of this tradition, hence my caveat at the
beginning of this preface. We have a long way to go before we have a complete
historical picture of this massive literature.
Theoretical Considerations Based on the Historiography of tafsīr in the

Arab World
I would like, here, to discuss some of the methodological considerations that a close
reading of this Arabic historiography entails. The publication of al-Fihris al-shāmil
makes possible those methodological tools which previously lacked the backing they
needed when I first articulated them. Readers who are familiar with my previous work
will be familiar with aspects of my approach.9 The issues presented here will be more
systematically explained if only because I have since had the benefit of time to reflect
and refine them. I have already characterised the tafsīr tradition as a genealogical
tradition.10 When I first formulated this description I was not aware of the whole field
of network theory, especially social network analysis. Since then I have grown much
more certain that understanding tafsīr through the lens of social network analysis is
the best approach to the understanding of the history of this genre. As the field of
tafsīr is too young to allow the gathering of complete statistical data to chart detailed
maps of tafsīr networks (or structures), my use of social network analysis is more
corroborative than quantitatively applied. The little data we are able to gather,
however, does fit into a network that is best analysed using the insights of social
network theory.
Tafsīr is a genealogical literature insofar as it is a genre that has always been

dependent on an ancient inherited corpus of material. This inherited corpus constituted
a core that was continuously cited or, if not, purposefully discarded; thus even when
not present the core was determinative since it was foundational. The core was
ascribed to individual authorities who were invoked as a legitimising tool for the
specific interpretation concerned. There was, moreover, a constant shuffle in the
hierarchy of individuals who were considered authorities. The core of cited material
was also added to, refined, reassessed or simply rejected. We also witness the
development of distinctive separate cores of tafsīr material. Thus there was a Ṣūfī
core, a Sunnī inherited core and a Shīʿī inherited core. These were not hermetically
sealed entities but rather coexisted and competed, and at many instances were
moulded into a coherent unit.
There was thus a presumption of history in the Islamic hermeneutics of the Qur’an.
Not a history of the revelation of the Qur’an, which was taken for granted if only in a
contradictory fashion, but a historical memory of a continuous Muslim engagement
with the meaning of the Qur’an. An exegete has to know this history to know the
meaning of the Qur’an. Tafsīr acquired the stability of a defined genre via the network
of cited authorities and the connections between the different authorities inside a
particular corpus of citations. The legitimising tool was thus more than scholarly,
it was also guild-based, and recognised names acquired currency regardless of the
value of any particular interpretation that seemed shaky when scrutinised closely. The
guild of exegetes however did not have a free hand, their authority to interpret the
Qur’an has to be always re-established and reaffirmed in the face of continuous
challenge from other centres of authorities that always claimed an authority over the
meaning of the Qur’an. Exegetes have to contend with a competing system of
authority that was forming itself above and beyond the Qur’an and the exegetical
social network. There were distinct groups that claimed to speak for the Qur’an and its
meaning: the jurists, the charismatic revolutionaries, and theologians. The most
independent group, however, remained the linguists; the grammarians were soon
voicing their interpretations without regard to what the authorities in tafsīr had to say.
Since philology became the foundational intellectual paradigm of medieval Islam,
philology remained the grand menace for the field of tafsīr.
Let me give an example of what I mean by a core of inherited material. The Ibn
ʿAbbās (d. 69/688) Qur’anic interpretive corpus is one of the oldest in the tafsīr
literature, it is also the most cited. Yet, this was not the only component of the core,
there was a host of early authorities that were part of this early core and all enjoyed
widespread legitimacy. But the core was not restricted to this early layer, a late figure
like al-Zajjāj would become as essential a component of the tafsīr core as Ibn ʿAbbās
was, thus becoming a defining part of the tafsīr corpus. As a matter of fact al-Zajjāj’s
corpus will become one of the defining elements of the mainstream interpretive core
for most of the history of tafsīr, and its addition to the core happened well after
al-Ṭabarī’s lifetime, it was al-Thaʿlabī and his student al-Wāḥidī who made al-Zajjāj
the centre of their core, thus making clear that the core corpus was not a stable entity,
and was hardly defined by al-Ṭabarī. Compare that with the opinions of al-Ṭabarī
which were expressed usually at the end of his interpretation of a particular aya, these,
although representing the views of a very famous exegete, did not constitute an
essential part of the core, though some exegetes valued him highly. Only in the
modern period, after the publication of al-Ṭabarī’s commentary in 1905 did it become
an essential component of the modern tafsīr core.
Defining tafsīr as a genealogical literature is not only a way of describing the internal
mechanism of this genre, but it also helps us study its historical development by
allowing us to determine which works were essential in the history of the genre. Social
network analysis is the only way we have to arrange the hundred of books authored
during the long history of this genre into a meaningful hierarchal order, enabling us to
determine which of them was more influential than others. One needs a measuring tool
to assess the significance of any given book, and the frequency of use is the only
quantitative measure that we can justifiably employ. Thus the centrality of a work was
reflected by the frequency of its citation. In other words, whether that particular work,
which was itself made of an accretion of core corpuses, has itself turned into part of
the core corpus of tafsīr. A seventh-century Hijri exegete quoting an interpretation
from Ibn ʿAbbās is not the same as al-Thaʿlabī quoting the same interpretative
lemma. Al-Thaʿlabī accessed Ibn ʿAbbās directly, while the later exegete accessed
him through an intermediary, most probably al-Thaʿlabī himself, thereby turning
al-Thaʿlabī into a core corpus.
A history of tafsīr has to be thus keenly aware of the developments in tafsīr studies in
the Arab world, for they make possible real advances in our charting of the history of
tafsīr. Hence, al-Baghawī, whose Qur’an commentary is usually mentioned in passing

in encyclopaedia entries on tafsīr, if he is mentioned at all, becomes a very important
figure in light of my argument about the genealogical nature of tafsīr, since he was
fundamental in solidifying the grip of the Nīshāpūrī school on tafsīr tradition through
his re-editing of the work of al-Thaʿlabī – al-Baghawī’s tafsīr was a reworking of
al-Thaʿlabī’s tafsīr. The large number of extant manuscripts of al-Baghawī’s
commentary which, thanks to al-Fihris al-shāmil, we can have a rough measure of,
clearly indicates that this was a very popular commentary. But, far more significant is
the conscious decision on the part of al-Baghawī to edit the work of al-Thaʿlabī,
which indicates that he was fully aware of the influence and significance of the
Nīshāpūrī school.
The second methodological issue that I would like to discuss here is the classification
of tafsīr works. Since tafsīr literature is an integrative literature, any attempt to
classify tafsīr works according to content is counter-productive. Any given Qur’an
commentary, even the shortest, exhibits most of the characteristics of the genre.
Already, Amīn al-Khūlī has raised serious doubt about the usefulness of Goldziher’s
classification of tafsīr works according to content – primitive, traditional, dogmatic,
mystical, Ṣūfī, sectarian and modern.11 The content of any given Qur’an commentary
is too complex to fit into one mould. It is, rather, much more productive to classify the
genre, in the post-Ṭabarī period, into three structural divisions, which describe the aim
of a given work as opposed to its content. This tripartite division is also intended for
the musalsal tafsīr works, the works that offer a complete running interpretation of all
the Qur’an. (Other forms of interpretive works which are not full interpretations of the
whole of the Qur’an are already identified in the native tradition with different names
that reflect their function, works like maʿānī, gharīb, qirāʾāt and iʿrāb, etc.)
The first kind of tafsīr work in this categorisation is the encyclopaedic (muṭawwalāt
al-tafsīr).12 This division includes the major summa works of tafsīr. These works
were massive, both in their volume and in the sources they utilised. They became
gateways for later authors, allowing a collective summary of the field and
incorporating the latest development in the cultural and intellectual environment of
the Islamic religious tradition. They became fundamental in redirecting the genre and
keeping it connected to the major cultural issues occupying the intellectual elite. The
chequered history of a given encyclopaedic Qur’an commentary is also part of the
history of the genre. How and when a work became influential and in what regions of
the Islamic world? At what moment did it become insignificant? Who rediscovered it?
And finally when was it printed in the modern period and why? These questions are
fundamental to the understanding of the history of tafsīr, just as a hermeneutical
analysis of tafsīr is. Examples of this kind of works are the works of al-Ṭabarī,
al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944), al-Thaʿlabī, al-Wāḥidī (as author of al-Basīṭ), al-Rāzī, Ibn
ʿAṭiyya, al-Qurṭubī, Abū Ḥayyān al-Gharnaṭī, etc.
The second type of tafsīr work is the madrasa-style work. These are works that
developed after the rise of encyclopaedic works and grew out of and depended on
them. The madrasa commentaries were more ‘issues’ commentaries: that is they have
a more specific reason for being composed, whether organisational, like readability, or
doctrinal, advocating a certain ideological position towards the Qur’an. Thus Ṣūfī
Qur’an commentaries are grouped here. The need for the madrasa-style commentary
rose with the increased professionalisation of the craft of tafsīr and the urgency for
handy works that could be used as a first reference tool before delving into larger
encyclopaedic references. They summarised the issues in tafsīr and usually avoided
the larger context of a given hermeneutical problem. The madrasa commentaries
would increasingly take centre stage in the curriculum of the education of the ʿulamāʾ.
Indeed, teaching tafsīr in the madrasa was based on using these works as textbooks.
The length of such works was such that they could usually be written in two volumes,
making them easy to copy, buy and use. Examples of madrasa commentaries are
the works of al-Wāḥidī (as the author of al-Wasīṭ), al-Zamakhsharī, al-Bayḍāwī,
al-Baghawī, al-Khāzin, Tafsīr al-Jalālayn, etc.
The third type of tafsīr work is the ḥāshiya-style commentary. These

were supercommentaries that were written on three specific madrasa-style
commentaries – al-Zamakhsharī’s al-Kashshāf, al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl and the
Tafsīr al-Jalālayn of al-Maḥallī (d. 864/1459) and al-Suyūṭī – used to teach tafsīr in
the madrasa curriculum. The role of the ḥāshīya in the history of tafsīr is fundamental
since it is through the ḥāshīya that the art of tafsīr was assessed and developed.
These three categories of composition encompass the whole spectrum of tafsīr works
since al-Ṭabarī. The division purposefully avoids any content description since most
of these commentaries were not monotone, nor was tafsīr as a genre capable of
producing a work whose hermeneutical structure used only one method (works that
exhibit such characteristics are best grouped in the madrasa-style commentary
category). The function of a work is the determinant factor in my division. A
discussion of hermeneutics is not to be confused with the nature of a given work,
although certain hermeneutical methods dictated the form and the volume of a given
Qur’an commentary. This division of the classical genre of tafsīr into three types is
not meant to solve all the problems of categorisation, it is an approximation of the
reality of the genre. Yet, given the complexity of the situation, I believe that this
tripartite division is the most effective descriptive categorisation we can envision that
does justice to the genre.
The Radical Underbelly of tafsīr and a History of the Term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr
Al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār, one of the great Muʿtazilī theologians, offered a summary of
the Islamic hermeneutical attitudes to the Qur’an in his book al-Mughnī fī abwāb
al-tawḥīd wa’l-ʿadl. It offers a truncated, albeit accurate, account of the hermeneutical

landscape in Islam, which was undoubtedly tailored to serve al-Qāḍī’s polemical
ends, and in reality it distorts the situation through its exaggerations and sheer
misrepresentations. This is a late source for the early period and it is neither
exhaustive nor historical; but the listed positions offer, by the very act of polemical
manipulation, a stark dramatisation of the hermeneutical landscape of the early Islamic
period. I will offer here a full translation of the section, and then discuss it in the light
of Ignaz Goldziher’s still incisive analysis of the story of early tafsīr,13 Harris
Birkeland’s corrective input,14 and al-Qāḍī’s distorting (yet paradoxically significant)
insights, so as to highlight the implications of this passage for an understanding of
early Islamic hermeneutical battles:15
Know that the opponents from amongst the nonbelievers, while

excessive in their attacks on the Qur’an, never reached the summits
attained by the sects that pretend to belong to Islam, since these
sects have among them extremists (ghulāt) and people who believe in
the inner reality (bāṭiniyya), describing and calling themselves
partisans (tashayyuʿ), while in reality they are not so. They have
attacked and impinged the integrity of the Qur’an in so many ways.
[Similar to them] there are also the ways of the commoners (ʿawwām)
and the people of Tradition (ḥadīth). We will now mention some
of what they say about the Qur’an, then we shall refute these
statements.
Some people said about the Qur’an: ‘it has no meaning. God has sent it
down in order that we believe in it and recite it.’
Some people said: ‘it has a meaning, but we have no way to
substantiate what we think that meaning is. As such we cannot claim
any knowledge of the Qur’an.’ Now those who believe this have
differed among themselves as to why this is the case. Some of them
said: ‘speech can possibly have no meanings.’ Some others said:
‘speech could have meanings, but God’s speech is a special case, and
only the Prophet knows its meaning. Therefore one has to go back to
what has been narrated from the Prophet regarding the meaning of the
Qur’an.’ Some of them said: ‘actually we have to go back to what have
been narrated from the Prophet, the Companions or the Successors. No
one beside, or after these, has a right to interpret or comment on the
Qur’an.’
Some other people said: ‘the Qur’an has inner meanings, distinct and
not related to what its apparent meaning is’, and they moreover claim
‘that we discern these inner meanings from the knowledge of an
authority, either the Prophet or the Imām.’
Some others said: ‘the Qur’an, though it has no inner meanings, as the
baṭiniyya claim, nevertheless, its meaning is only known to the Imām
and one has to refer to his authority on this – or to the Prophet.’
Some others said: ‘some parts of the Qur’an do have a meaning, this
constitutes the muḥkam parts. As for the ambiguous parts (mutashābih)
they have no meaning, since there is no proof or evidence to
substantiate their meaning.’ There are some that believe the same yet
insist that one has to go back to the Prophet, the Imāms or the Salaf.
Al-Qāḍī is pretending to report on the hermeneutical currents in Islam, but in reality he

is reporting about the hermeneutical positions of the early radical groups in Sunnism
and Shīʿism; it was clearly not in his interest to inform his readers of the mainstream
currents in either. The value of his reporting, however, is that it makes clear the
parallelism in the Sunnī and Shīʿī radical movements. To the ultra-radical Sunnī the
Qur’an alone sufficed, it needed nothing and no one was needed to make it clear. To
the ultra-radical Shīʿī the Qur’an was useless as such, it needed the Imām and without
the Imām it was nothing. Al-Qāḍī also preserves a neat gradation in radical positions,
almost too neat, yet instructive as to what was at stake: the Qur’an with no meaning,
the Qur’an that has meaning but which is impossible to disclose, the Prophet alone as
its interpreter, the Prophet plus his Companions, and their Followers, as the sole
interpreters. There is also a similar gradation in the Shīʿī paradigm, with the Imām
ultimately as the sole guardian of meaning.
The significance of this paragraph is that it leaves no doubt that the radical Sunnī
hermeneutical approach to the Qur’an has nothing to do with the mainstream Sunnī
interpretive tradition. Al-Qāḍī’s characterisation is not what Sunnī hermeneutics is or
was then. The Sunnīs would come up with their own term for their approach to the
interpretation of the Qur’an, al-tafsīr bi’l-ʿilm, interpretation by knowledge; the
problem has always been that one was not sure what exactly this term means. Yet, it
was never perceived as being restricted to the early three generations as such. The
Sunnī paradigm, more importantly, has a negative term to describe the approach of
their enemies, al-tafsīr bi’l-raʾy, and Sunnīs supposedly did not engage in this wilful
distortion of God’s word. Needless to say, the distinction between the two modes
turned out to be a mirage, insofar as if one belonged to the approved list of Sunnī
authorities one was a practitioner of al-tafsīr bi’l-ʿilm, if one was not, one was then
doing the other!
When the Sunnī hermeneutical paradigm came to be fully articulated, whether by

al-Ṭabarī, or by Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 150/767) or even as far back as the Ibn
ʿAbbās layer, Arabic language and the freedom of the exegete to ascertain the word of
God stood at the centre of this enterprise. The Jāhilī line of poetry was there bound to
the verse of God. This philological sensitivity was, however, bound to the core Sunnī
sensibility, a respect for the Sunna of the community, and the opinions of the leading
religious authorities were given as much weight as philological acumen. Thus, Sunnī
hermeneutical practice was heading towards its most characteristic feature, the
layering of meanings, the voice of the community across the centuries as bearer of
hermeneutical authority.
When the history of tafsīr began to be written in the twentieth century, however,
confusion crept into the picture when the term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr was used to refer
to ‘Sunnī’ mainstream hermeneutical practice. Al-Ṭabarī is not a tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr
practioner, if by that we understand an exegete who only transmits from the Prophet
and his Companions and the Followers. That is not what al-Ṭabarī was offering us in
his commentary. He is nevertheless the epitome of Sunnī tafsīr. The introduction of
the term ‘al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr’ into the historiography of tafsīr was the result of a
fascinating development that only now is becoming apparent. What has happened is
that the internal, modern, Sunnī struggles over hermeneutics, by lending a term to the
history of tafsīr, shaped (or misshaped) the historiography of tafsīr negatively (both in
the Arab world and in Western academia). A term that was first used by al-Suyūṭī as a
title for his Qur’an commentary, to reflect his alliance to Ibn Taymiyya’s radical
hermeneutical paradigm, would surface in the twentieth century as the defining
characteristic of Sunnī mainstream practice, which was never actually the case.
The term was then picked up by Western scholars (especially English language
scholarship) to be used as an analytical descriptive term for Sunnī hermeneutical
practices, adding to the conundrum.
Thus, it is time to realise that this term, al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr, is an ideological term
that was coined in the wake of the manifesto of Ibn Taymiyya, who single handedly
attempted to resuscitate the radical current in the Sunnī hermeneutical tradition that
was always on the margins. After al-Suyūṭī, al-Shawkānī came up with his own
term, al-tafsīr bi’l-riwāya, while creating a false dichotomy in the tradition, only
to claim that he was the one who would heal the rift between the two branches
of the Sunnī hermeneutical tradition.16 Al-Shawkānī’s term did not catch on,
but al-Suyūṭī’s did. Thus the term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr was already envisioned
by Sunnī radicals as a means to reform Sunnī hermeneutical practice and not to
describe it. When it was picked up by the Azharī Salafī historians it concluded
the final stage of a transformation of the hermeneutical landscape of the Sunnī
paradigm.
There is no need here to retell the story of the early opposition to tafsīr, which for all
practical purposes has been dealt with superbly by Birkeland, and whose insights,
with some modifications, on the matter are my guiding principle in this matter; I rather
want to emphasise that the old opposition to tafsīr did not die out in Islam, as most
scholars suggest – opposition to tafsīr mutated into opposition to any tafsīr beyond
those of the Salaf. Since Birkeland was not concerned with the post-Ṭabarī history of
tafsīr, he was not aware of the continuous relevance of this hermeneutical stance
in Sunnī Islam, which he thought had been modified. The position of those who
considered tafsīr to be the prerogative of the Prophet, the Companions and the
Successors, did not die out with the triumph of the hermeneutical program of the
mainstream Sunnī establishment. It remained a marginal and periodically effective
opposition to the Sunnī mainstream’s hermeneutical compromise with philology.
This fringe movement in Sunnism remained robustly capable of resurrecting itself
periodically. Sunnī hermeneutical history thus has the seed of radicalism always
embedded in it.
The peculiar history of the term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr has meant that it has been used
to mean two different things. The first kind of tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr: the radical tafsīr, as
used by the Azharī historians, which claimed that only the Prophet – Companion –
Successor triad is allowed to interpret the Qur’an (a variation on this position would
be the ultra-radical, that only the Prophet knew the meaning of the Qur’an, or that
there was to be no ‘meaning’ to the Qur’an); the second kind of tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr is
used to refer to the Sunnī mainstream hermeneutical practice (the al-Ṭabarī kind), the
one we usually think of when we use this term. Added to this double meaning is the
fact that the radical Azharī Salafī historians also used the term to legitimise the Sunnī
hermeneutical heritage on their own terms. Since most of the Sunnī exegetical
tradition was not of the tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr mode, they could hardly afford to reject this
whole corpus en masse. Thus the term came to function as an ideological label given
to exegetes sanctioned by the Azharī Salafī historiographers, regardless whether the
exegete was or was not deserving of this term; Sunnī hermeneutical activities were
described by this rubric so as to present this tradition as always attempting to live up
to the rules of al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr.17 Al-Ṭabarī is a tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr exegete only
if we understand the rubric ideologically and not factually, the term now modified to
both look mainstream Sunnī and pretend that Sunnism was always writing tafsīr in
this mode. In the introduction to his commentary, al-Ṭabarī has three kinds of material
in the Qur’an: the material that only God knows the meaning of, which for all practical
purposes is a pietistic category with no implications on the hermeneutical level; the
material that only the Prophet could explain, this was rather miniscule in any case; and
material that any knowledgeable person of Arabic language can explain – which was
practically all of the Qur’an.18 Such an understanding of tafsīr has nothing to do with
the radical Sunnī position – and hence when we use the ambiguous term tafsīr
bi’l-maʾthūr we should be clear what we mean by it (it is best to disregard it as an
analytical term altogether). Indeed al-Ṭabarī included a chapter refuting the position of
those who claimed that only the Prophet can interpret the Qur’an.19 Ahl al-lisān, the
people of philology, were always the essential part of the Sunnī hermeneutical
paradigm.20
The radical hermeneutical program of the ahl al-ḥadīth, the one that was championed
by Ibn Taymiyya, and ridiculed by al-Qāḍī above, would have certainly doomed the
Sunnī paradigm were it to triumph early on (it has to wait to the twentieth century for
this victory). Interpretation was unavoidable no matter how many protested. Two
factors sealed the fate of this radical position and necessitated the triumph of the more
adaptive approach: the first factor was the Muʿtazilī intellectual challenge (a fact
already mentioned by Birkeland), and the second was the birth of Arabic philology.
The Muʿtazilī program was impossible to counter unless the Sunnī paradigm
answered its use of philology as the foundation of interpretation. Thus, it was not the
content of Muʿtazilī theology that mattered but its self-presentation as a rational
philological understanding of the Qur’an that was the danger. Philology was the real
victor in medieval Islam, and all had to answer to the dictates of philology.21
The early radical Sunnī hermeneutical approach was actually an ideological stance
more than a hermeneutical program. It was devised to explain what will be accepted
and what will be rejected, not how one explains the Qur’an (the traditionalist never
bothered to explain how a Companion knew the meaning of a certain aya, let alone a
Follower, granted Ibn Taymiyya would). Thus, even the most traditionalist of the
Sunnī establishment was incapable of living up to this austere paradigm. The earliest
manifestations of ḥadīth-oriented tafsīr are to be found in the Sunnī ḥadīth collections.
The chapters on tafsīr in these collections are the most prominent manifestation of
al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr paradigm – the real question is which tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr we are
dealing with here. Is it the radical or the more mainstream? Take the book on tafsīr
al-Qurʾān in al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ. This is the largest and most extensive book on tafsīr
in any of the six collections – actually only two of the six contain independent books
on tafsīr.22 For a ḥadīth scholar who lives and dies by the veracity of asānīd, this is a
very peculiar section of his Ṣaḥīḥ; Speight has already noted the ‘many puzzling
anomalies’ in this part of the work.23 The book on tafsīr in al-Bukhārī includes many
interpretations without isnād, and these are not those of Muḥammad, his Companions,
or his Followers! Sezgin has noted that al-Bukhārī had used the Majāz al-Qurʾān
of Abū ʿUbayda,24 so it is clear that al-Bukhārī has no problems quoting material
that does not fit the radical paradigm. What was going on then here? If he was
uncomfortable with tafsīr, he should have followed those who refused to give tafsīr a
special place in their collections. This camp who refused to have a chapter on tafsīr in
their ḥadīth collections might be thought of as reflecting the ultra-radical position: that
only Muḥammad knew the meaning of the Qur’an, and since his Sunna was the lived
Qur’an there was no need for ‘interpreting’ the Qur’an.
What al-Bukhārī and, ultimately, the traditional conservative Sunnī ideologues were
doing was far more subtle than simply refusing to interpret or restricting the
interpretation of the Qur’an. To them hermeneutics was narration, and tafsīr meant the
opinions of Muḥammad and primarily of his followers as guardians of his Sunna.
Tafsīr presented in this format, the ḥadīth format, ceased to be a danger. To function
authoritatively tafsīr has to be part of ḥadīth, and not an independent field where
legitimacy for religious and theological position could issue from an interpretation of
scripture, an interpretation that by definition is not controlled by the sunna jāmiʿa, the
guarantor of the salvation of community.
The individual voice was the danger, not because that voice lacked faith, but because
an individual threatened the salvation of the umma. As long as the presentation was in
the medium of the genre of ḥadīth it did not matter what opinions were expressed,
that is why this chapter quoted the interpretations of late scholars, who were neither
Companions nor Followers. It was thus not the manner of interpretation that really
mattered, but the location of interpretation. If one was to interpret, it had to be in the
Sunna matrix. The Sunna is the authority, to imbed Abū ʿUbayda in this matrix is to
rob tafsīr of an independent voice, it does not mean a succumbing to tafsīr. To the
radicals it was not enough to have an isnād to your interpretation, it has to be located
in ḥadīth and its world. The interpretive act has to be subsumed under the Sunna, part
of it and issuing from it. There was thus not to be a foundation to hermeneutics that
allowed for inspection and verification of the interpretive utterance apart from its
context. The location is what matters, not the substance. Tafsīr was not to be a
generative field – at least that is what the paradigm aimed at.
It is clear that even in the Sunna citadel, the Bukhārī collection, tafsīr as a rational
philological exercise was already present. There was no possibility to offer tafsīr
without going beyond the Salaf. Yet the Salaf-oriented radical trend had its profound
and emotional appeal to a jamāʿ minded community and it would prove impossible to
dislodge. The first Qur’an commentary that we know of that was motivated to present
a Salaf-oriented tafsīr, in an ideological fashion, is the Qur’an Commentary of Ibn Abī
Ḥātim (d. 327/938).25 I am here discounting the Qur’an commentaries of ʿAbd al-
Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī, al-Nasāʾī, Ibn Mujāhid, etc. These were actually part of the early
layer of tafsīr, and they are as much tafsīr bi’l-raʾy as any other tafsīr. They record the
opinions of individuals, mostly Qatāda and ʿIkrima, etc. and were also partly absorbed
into the mainstream Sunnī corpus – their rate of absorption into the mainstream was a
matter of choice of the encyclopaedic exegete authors. After their absorption into the
encyclopaedic commentaries of al-Ṭabarī and al-Thaʿlabī, they almost disappeared
from the horizon as independent units. Their elevation into the status of classics of the
tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr genre is the result of the Salafī reorientation of the twentieth
century in Arab lands and the scramble to edit this type of works is the result of an
intellectual program that has its foundation in Ibn Taymiyya’s praise for these authors.
The situation is different with Ibn Abī Ḥātim. One can argue that his is a work that
was fully aware of the mainstream Sunnī hermeneutical resolution (where philology
was central) and was attempting to circumvent its dictates. It is an attempt to reaffirm
the Prophet – Companion – Successor paradigm in spite of the rejection by the

mainstream Sunnī establishment of this model.26 It is not that Sunnism rejected the
material coming from this triad, on the contrary, it had enshrined it as foundational.
Sunnism however did not see fit to stop at that point only, moreover, the exegete was
seen as an independent agent capable of issuing judgements on previous opinions. The
presence of the Salaf layer in the mainstream Sunnī hermeneutical corpus meant that
an advocate of this layer had a very formidable argument for its supremacy. This was
the weak link in the medieval scholastic Sunnī hermeneutics. The fourth century AH
witnessed a plethora of works of tafsīr, works which were aimed at re-establishing the
primacy of the Salaf in tafsīr. We are ill equipped to fully understand why at this
moment we have such a concerted effort – a mostly failed effort I have to add. Still
the output is simply impressive.
In the introduction to his partially preserved Qur’an commentary Ibn Abī Ḥātim
states that:27
A group of my brethren asked me to produce a Qur’an commentary,

a summarized commentary, with the soundest isnāds, and omitting
the [alternate] lines of transmission, the lexicographical illustrations,
the variant readings, and the stories and information pertaining to the
revelation of the verses. [They requested] that we proceed straightaway
to the commentary, stripped of anything else (mujarrad), pure,
pursuing the commentary of the verses so that there is not a single
word of the Qur’an for which a commentary exists which I did not
cover. I assented to their request. So, I have sought to bring out this
work with the reports soundest in regard to isnāds and most full in
regard to content. When I found a commentary from the Prophet, I did
not mention along with it any of the Companions’ which said the same
thing. When I found a commentary from the Companions, if they were
in agreement, I cited it from the most exalted of them with the soundest
of isnāds, and then named those who agreed with them, omitting the
isnāds for these additional authorities. If they disagreed, I cited their
disagreement and gave an isnād for each one of them, and named
those who agreed with them, omitting the isnāds. If I did not find
a commentary from the Companions and I found one from the
Followers, I treated what I found coming from them in the same
fashion I described in regard to the Companions. Likewise, I did the
same in regard to the next generation and those after them.
This is the whole introduction of the tafsīr, rather terse in an age of effusive
introductions, but also effective. This is to be a purged tafsīr, mujarrad, a rather odd
word to live by in a commentary – since what else is a commentary but regurgitating.
The issue here was the personal opinion of an exegete who had the audacity to weigh
in with his opinion. That is what will be purged. Tafsīr will look like ḥadīth. The
lining up of interpretations in this commentary with their asānīd is not unusual at least
in the first instance, but then also eerily un-Sunnī. Here the naming of the authorities
and their opinions might lead one to think that this is another al-Ṭabarī, which could
not be further from the case. Al-Ṭabarī was hardly neutral, weighing in, and bringing
in the likes of Abū ʿUbayda and al-Farrāʾ, but also deciding which of the many
interpretations for a verse he favoured. Linguistic considerations were paramount for
al-Ṭabarī. He was also doing tafsīr proper, with variant readings, verse division,
syntax analysis, etc. Here in Ibn Abī Ḥātim we have a ḥadīth methodology as the
mode of interpreting, where the isnād is front and centre, but also the absence of non-
isnād material is as significant. This is a world that is brought into existence through
the isnād and not through a philological process.
There is an unexplained mystery in the medieval Islamic intellectual history: why

none of this type of tafsīr works survived when there were so many of them. One can
understand the obliteration of the Muʿtazilī heritage, but even there the situation is not
as dire as in this supposedly staunchly Sunnī material – the core material. Ibn Abī
Ḥātim’s tafsīr did not survive complete, a rather odd fate since he is not unknown. But
then Ibn Mardawayh’s (d. 410/1019) commentary, supposedly more famous than Ibn
Abī Ḥātim’s work, has also been lost.28 The tafsīr of Abū’l-Shaykh (d. 369/979)
is also lost,29 as are all the tafāsīr of Qiwām al-Sunna (Ismāʿīl b. Muḥammad,
d. 535/1140), despite the high standing this traditionalist scholar has enjoyed among
the ahl al-ḥadīth.30 Even the work of someone like Baqīy b. Makhlad (d. 276/889) did
not survive, although it was supposedly claimed to be better than that of al-Ṭabarī by
no one else but Ibn Ḥazm.31 That these exegetes each wrote a Qur’an commentary that
outdid al-Ṭabarī is a constant refrain among the conservative medieval appraisals.
Ibn Kathīr was unabashed in his praise for Ibn Abī Ḥātim stating that the work was
‘copious and contained the entire body of transmitted material and … surpasses the
commentary of al-Ṭabarī and all others’.32 We do know that these works were
available to Ibn Taymiyya, they were available to Ibn Kathīr, and al-Suyūṭī had full
access to this material. The tenth/sixteenth century is not far away, and most of the
material that survived this late is mostly available. Why these works would be lost
is only conceivable if we presume the existence of only a few copies, available to
al-Suyūṭī and then lost afterward because they were already worn out copies and there
was no interest in copying them.
Ibn Abī Ḥātim, Ibn Mardawayh and Abū’l-Shaykh are just a few examples of authors
of this type of commentary that somehow did not catch the imagination of anyone
till Ibn Taymiyya took it upon himself to call attention to them.33 The effect of that
call would prove dramatic in the long run. The championing by Ibn Kathīr and then
al-Suyūṭī, and then the Wahhābīs, of these authors meant that a medieval marginal
current would become central in the twentieth century. The story of this development
goes to the heart of the story of tafsīr as told today. Ibn Taymiyya’s call dates from the
eighth/fourteenth century, a fair distance in time from the third/ninth and fourth/tenth
centuries when these commentaries were mostly written. He was unhappy with the
mainstream works of his time, and praised the purity of these early works, calling
them works that mention the interpretation of the Companions, the Followers and their
Followers, in a pure form (ṣarf ).34 He lists many authors, singling out Ibn Abī Ḥātim,
Baqīy b. Makhlad and Ibn Mardawayh as worthy of praise – he does also include Ibn
Jarīr al-Ṭabarī.35
By then the presence of these authors in the mainstream Sunnī hermeneutical corpus
was non existent and they hardly, if ever, figure in any of the tafsīr works of
the establishment. Ibn Kathīr, writing in the eighth/fourteenth century, was the first
to reposition al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Abī Ḥātim and Ibn Mardawayh as central to Qur’an
commentary; being a student of Ibn Taymiyya he has the time to implement his
teacher’s program. The first version of his Qur’an commentary involved pruning
al-Ṭabarī and marrying him off to Ibn Abī Ḥātim and Ibn Mardawayh.36 Ibn Kathīr
however was not as radical as one would have wanted; he was unable to escape the
burden of the established tradition. Take his interpretation of Q. 2:2, that is the book,
wherein is no doubt, a guidance to the godfearing (li’l-muttaqīn), especially the word
‘godfearing’. Here he does what is expected, quoting al-Ṭabarī and Ibn Abī Ḥātim and
if, we are to accept the manuscript al-Azhar Tafsīr 168 as his first edition of the work,
that is all that he does here.37 The standard edition of his tafsīr however, which
follows a latter recension of the work, shows clearly that Ibn Kathīr also drew into his
orbit the usual standard classical works of tafsīr (al-Zamakhsahrī, al-Qurṭubī and
al-Rāzī), in this instance al-Qurṭubī (who was also quoting al-Thaʿlabī).38 The issue of
contamination is thus paramount in Ibn Kathīr. Far more important is that Ibn Kathīr
was all but forgotten, until discovered and reintroduced in the nineteenth century.39 As
such, even the incorporation of the Ibn Abī Ḥātim and Ibn Mardawayh material in an
encyclopaedic tafsīr work was useless for the time being since Ibn Kathīr was not
instrumental in the history of medieval tafsīr.
Yet, the ascendency of this trend of tafsīr depended on later developments. We have
to wait for al-Suyūṭī’s massive work al-Durr al-manthūr.40 Here the reorientation is
radical in ways that transforms tafsīr into a fully new art. If there is a tafsīr where
isnād and ḥadīth orientation is fully central it is here. Suddenly the whole corpus of
ḥadīth literature, not only Ibn Abī Ḥātim and Ibn Mardawyah, is the fodder for tafsīr.
Ironically, having reached this summit al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr has reached its limit.
It could go no further. Rediscovering these works and repositioning them as central in
the tradition of tafsīr was made possible by the massive effort of republication that
was carried out by the Salafī movement. The history of publication of tafsīr works is
thus paramount in my retelling. The publication of works from the medieval period
was an essential element in refashioning the hermeneutical landscape of modern

Islam. A history of tafsīr is also a history of the book in the Arab and Islamic World.
Shīʿī Developments
What has been so far discussed regarding the history of tafsīr is the Sunnī side of the
story. Shīʿī hermeneutical developments were however quite similar to this outline. A
radical insistence on the authority of the Imām was the hallmark of the pre-Buwayhid
period. Luckily, Meir Bar-Asher has already studied this early radical phase of Shīʿī
tafsīr in detail, so we need not go into it here.41 What needs to be added is that this
radicalism, according to which the Imām gave authoritative interpretation of the
meaning of the Qur’an, invariably a partisan interpretation that reaffirmed the validity
of Shīʿism and its worldview, was also welded to a believe that the ʿUthmānī codex of
the Qur’an was also incomplete and falsified by the Sunnīs. This was too radical a
position for scholastic Shīʿism, which in its classical phase saw to it that this position
was dropped and Shīʿī Qur’an interpretation was aligned with Sunnī and Muʿtazilī
practices. Figures like Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭūsī (d. 460/1067) and al-Faḍl b. al-Ḥasan
al-Ṭabrisī (d. 548/1153) read mostly like any Sunnī mainstream exegete, with a
sprinkling of Shīʿī leanings. What is interesting is that the early layer would witness a
violent return with the Safavid revival of Shīʿī scholarship. This radical Shīʿī trend,
like its counterpart in Sunnism, is a latent radical layer that periodically resurfaces and
complicates the hermeneutical structure of Shīʿism. Once more, we are well informed
of this trend thanks to the work of Todd Lawson.42
A History of the Term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr
It is evident that a clarification of the history of the term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr has
direct implications on our ability to carry a proper investigation of the history of tafsīr.
First, there is no evidence of the use of this term as an analytical term in the
indigenous scholarship on the nature of tafsīr before 1940. What we find is al-tafsīr
bi’l-ʿilm, but never al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr. This does not mean that there were no terms
to refer to material that was tradition-based, we do have a classification of tafsīr as
musnad al-tafsīr, a term first used by al-Wāḥidī in the introduction to his al-Wasīṭ.43
This term has a clearly puritanical ring to it. What it stood for was always on the
periphery. Whatever this approach to tafsīr was, it was a second rate approach in the
medieval scholastic world.
I have shown earlier that there was a radical fringe in tafsīr history, which one could
call al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr, the Ibn Abī Ḥātim and the like, but this strata in the
tradition was marginal and beleaguered, and it did lack the theoretical foundation
to withstand the constant attacks from its foes. It is not that only the Muʿtazilī
theologians made fun of the ‘triad’ approach to tafsīr, but also the grand figures of
the Sunnī establishment were ruthless in their ridicule of this trend.44 Al-Ghazālī
(d. 505/1111) was withering in his attack on people who would think that the meaning
of the Qur’an is privileged to Ibn ʿAbbās and Mujāhid and their likes only.45
Al-Ghazālī uses the word naql (‘transmission’), to refer to this form of interpretation.
Despite these attacks the trend nevertheless witnessed a remarkable literary production
that came about in the late fourth and early fifth centuries of the Hijra.
The first inkling of a change in the hermeneutical sophistication of this beleaguered

camp came from a scholar who wrote no Qur’an commentary (a fact that will
forever sadden his partisans), Ibn Taymiyya. He launched a formidable theoretical
justification for this form of tafsīr in his Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr, a foundational
text for the ḥadīth-oriented tafsīr.46 He, however, did not use any technical term for it
though, just a classification of the sources: tafsīr came from the Prophet, Companions
and their Successors. Not satisfied with defending one form of tafsīr, he went a
step further and dismissed many of the tafsīr works that were then popular, and
championed unknown and obscure works to the then seminary curriculum.
Ibn Kathīr, the student of Ibn Taymiyya, championed and implemented this approach
in his work. Granted, here the introduction, sprawling as it is, was also unable to
depart from the mainstream hermeneutical theory. The first conception of the
commentary authored by Ibn Kathīr was actually more radical than its final version in
which the mainstream of tafsīr is readmitted. Ibn Kathīr’s work is a reworking of
al-Ṭabarī and, as such, it is an attempt to turn the clock back on the field. This was a
lost call in the wilderness of medieval scholastic tradition, a tradition that was solidly
behind the Bayḍāwī-Zamakhsharī paradigm. One has to admire the resolve of Ibn
Kathīr (and his tribulations) since he was writing his commentary in the century that
was the apex of the ḥāshiya as the mode of writing tafsīr in the madrasa.
The real turning point in this story was the work of al-Suyūṭī. The title of al-Suyūṭī’s
commentary, al-Durr al-manthūr fī’l-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr, can be seen as the defining
moment of the birth of the term, but also of the formulation of the tafsīr as a takhrīj
work – the place where individual atomised interpretative units are collated from the
ḥadīth literature – tafsīr now is just collation of already existing narrated material.
The very language of introducing an interpretive phrase was borrowed from the most
characteristic of ḥadīth works, wa-akhraja (‘it has been narrated in an authoritative
work of ḥadīth’). When al-Suyūṭī wrote this commentary, it was part of a triad of
works on tafsīr. First there was his Tafsīr al-Jalālayn, a continuation of the work of
his teacher Jalāl al-Maḥallī. There was his ḥāshiya on al-Bayḍāwī, a work that is now
all but forgotten. The one which proved most influential was his al-Durr al-manthūr.
The next stage in the history of the term came with the composition of al-Shawkānī’s
Qur’an commentary Fatḥ al-qadīr, with the subtitle al-Jāmiʿ bayn fannay al-riyāwa
wa’l-dirāya min ʿilm al-tafsīr (‘The Conciliator in the Two Arts of tafsīr, That of
Tradition, riwāya, and That of Rational Reasoning, dirāya’). The introduction is

shameless in its caricaturing of the tradition, dividing it into two stark contrasting and
competing paradigms: on one hand people who undertake only tafsīr through
traditions (riwāya), and on the other those who do it through philology (dirāya).
Al-Shawkānī presents himself as the grand conciliator of these two camps of the
tradition. It is clear that al-Shawkānī was aware of Ibn Kathīr’s and al-Suyūṭī’s works,
placing them at the centre of the tradition, insofar as they represent one of the radical
sides of tafsīr. He was also very aware of the significance of al-Suyūṭī’s al-Durr
al-manthūr, rightly assessing it as the pinnacle in this art of composition, but also the
work that saved us this material from oblivion. Al-Shawkānī clearly has no access to
the forerunners of these two authors.
The cumulative effect of the works as they appeared in publication is a remarkable

reconfiguration of tafsīr. What was peripheral is moving and edging closer to the
centre. We have now major figures of the seminary system writing works on tafsīr that
gave preponderance of weight to the method of ḥadīth in tafsīr. More importantly,
tafsīr by ḥadīth method has now a definite term to go by (at least in titles of works).
Indeed we have two: tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr and tafsīr bi’l-riwāya.
The story then moves to nineteenth-century India, where a Muslim scholar and
disciple of the teachings of Wahhābism, Muḥammad Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān (d. 1890)
would carry the torch of this approach, although still gingerly. The remarkable aspect
of this story is that the Qur’an commentary written by this scholar, Fatḥ al-bayān fī
maqāṣid al-Qurʾān, was the earliest of the ḥadīth-oriented tafāsīr to be published.
This tafsīr was published, before the works of Ibn Kathīr, al-Suyūṭī or al-Shawkānī, in
Bhopal in 1873 in four magnificent volumes at the expense of the author himself.
The introduction was a call for the centrality of the works of Ibn Kathīr, al-Suyūṭī and
al-Shawkānī. Such was the intimate connection between this work and Ibn Kathīr’s
that the first print of Ibn Kathīr’s work was on the margins of the Fatḥ al-bayān when
it was reissued in Cairo in 1294/1877.47
Al-Shawkānī’s tafsīr was not published until 1349/1930, already too late in the
game to influence the nomenclature in the field, although it added to the conviction
that there was such a thing as ḥadīth-based tafsīr.48 Al-Durr al-manthūr has been
published much earlier, in 1314/1896.49 The title of books now has become an
important factor in deciding the discourse of the field. Thus, by the time al-Ṭabarī’s
Qur’an commentary was published in 1905, we have all the major works of tafsīr that
were ḥadīth-based (in the case of al-Ṭabarī this was more the result of a confusion due
to the presence of full asānīd in his work and not because the work was indeed ḥadīth-
based) published in print. The miserly treatment of Ibn Kathīr’s Qur’an commentary,
published on the margin of another work, would be soon rectified, and he was moved
from the margins to the centre when the four-volume Būlāq 1302/1884 edition of
his tafsīr came out.50 The centrality of Ibn Kathīr’s work was made manifest when a
nine-volume edition came out in 1924, printed by Rashīd Riḍā and with money from
the newly powerful Saudi king ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl Saʿūd.51 This edition was also
physically very different in format from the usual tafsīr works hitherto fashionable in
the Islamic world. The format was basically modern, a move away from the standard
Būlāq crowded-page format, and this was luxuriously printed. The page was divided
in two, with an upper part for Ibn Kathīr’s Qur’an commentary and the bottom part for
al-Baghawī’s Maʿālim al-tanzīl. It was no secret that Ibn Taymiyya thought highly
of the editorial work of al-Baghawī, Maʿālim al-tanzīl being a clean up job of
al-Thaʿlabī’s al-Kashf wa’l-bayān. By giving tafsīr works the same format as other
important works the Salafī movement was moving tafsīr into the centre of their
cultural activities. Soon the new reprint of al-Rāzī’s work would be issued in the same
format and not in the old Būlāq format of the nineteenth century (I am referring to the
thirty-two-volume edition of al-Rāzī’s work which started to appear in 1933).
The presence of this massive amount of tafsīr literature championing one version of
tafsīr was bound to have a huge impact on the field. It was only a matter of time before
the hermeneutical discussions of the field reflected this situation. The very titles of
works have now implications for the hermeneutical reflections going on in Cairo. But
when did the term move from book titles to discussions of tafsīr? Before answering
this question we have to mention two events that were crucial to the story of
hermeneutical debate in twentieth-century Cairo. The first was the publication of the
entry article by the Azharī Amīn al-Khūlī on ‘Tafsīr’ in the Arabic version of
the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-Islāmiyya, in 1933 (as discussed
above). This was a long article, radically departing from the norms of the time and
calling for a reorientation of tafsīr. Its disdain for the usual way of doing tasfīr was a
challenge for the establishment which unnerved it and put it on alert. It did not go
unanswered. The second was the publication in 1936 in Damascus of Ibn Taymiyya’s
Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr. Thus, by 1936 all the works that would influence the
debate were already in print. These last two texts could not be more different, almost
mirror images of each other: one staunchly Salafī, where the orientation is to the Salaf,
one modernist and futurist in its outlook.
Now we can begin to answer the question as to when did the use of the term al-tafsīr
bi’l-maʾthūr as an analytical term began. Al-Azhar, having decided to renovate its
programs, asked one of its members to write a textbook for ʿulūm al-Qurʾān. The first
edition of this textbook, Manāhil al-ʿirfān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān by Muḥammad ʿAbd
al-ʿAẓīm al-Zurqānī, appeared between 1936 and 1940 – the bibliographic data as it
stands now has made it impossible to ascertain what year exactly the first edition
appeared.52 It is here that we first see the use of al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr as an analytical
term. In his discussion on the divisions of tafsīr, al-Zurqānī cites unnamed sources
that have divided tafsīr into three categories: tafsīr bi’l-riwāya also called al-tafsīr
bi’l-maʾthūr; al-tafsīr bi’l-dirāya also known as al-tafsīr bi’l-raʾy; and lastly tafsīr
bi’l-ishāra.53 It is here that we have the first attempt to use this terminology
analytically, albeit with some hesitation as to which of the two term to use (riwāya
or maʾthūr). The heading of the chapters however leaves no doubt that al-tafsīr
bi’l-maʾthūr was the preferred term. Far more importantly, we have here the marrying
of this term to the analytical description of Ibn Taymiyya in his Muqaddima.54 The
circle is now complete. Those who use the term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr have to thus be
aware that its origin as an analytical descriptive term lies in an Azharī text book, in
which the term is used, however, to argue for a proto-Salafī position. When we use it
to describe the tradition we, no matter how cautious we are, are actually lending
authority to the Salafī paradigm of how to understand the history of tafsīr.
The publication of the first incomplete translation of Ignaz Goldziher by ʿAlī Ḥasan
ʿAbd al-Qādir in 1944 which used the term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr to refer to
Goldziher’s German term ‘traditionelle Koranauslegung’ sealed the fate of the term.55
This translation of the first three chapters of the original came in the wake of Amīn al-
Khūlī’s article on tafsīr, and was a major event in the cultural life of Cairo. The
introduction to this now very rare work makes it clear that the incentive for this
translation came originally from a call by al-Azhar to make available Orientalists’
works in Arabic.56 The al-Azhar administration had decided during its 4 May 1942
council meeting to constitute committees to translate the major works of Orientalists
into Arabic; this endeavour failed due to a lack of people with sufficient knowledge of
Western languages among the Azharīs. Noting and explaining this failure, ʿAlī ʿAbd
al-Qādir, took it upon himself to fill the gap in this regard. Incidentally, the full
translation of Goldziher’s work on tafsīr was undertaken by ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm al-Najjār
in 1954 (hence the fall into disuse of ʿAbd al-Qādir’s early partial translation).
By the time Muḥammad al-Dhahabī published what was to become the standard
history in the field, al-Tafsīr wa’l-mufassirūn (sometime soon after 1946, the year the
dissertation that forms the basis of the work was defended), the term al-tafsīr
bi’l-maʾthūr has become the central analytical term in defining tafsīr. Al-Dhahabī
treats the term as if it is the only analytical paradigm that can be mustered to judge
tafsīr and its history. Indeed al-Dhahabī’s work is a reworking of Manāhil al-ʿirfān
into a more radical version, more in line with Ibn Taymiyya’s outlook. Clearly the
new textbook was all too successful in redirecting the outlook of tafsīr.
Al-Dhahabī’s history is thus a turning point in the history of tafsīr historiography.

By acting as the resolution site for different Salafī articulations it solidified the Salafī
grip on tafsīr historiography. Let me give an example. The 1936 edition of the
Muqaddima has an appendix that highlights some paragraphs from the text itself.57
This appendix was supplied by the editor. The (by then obscure and unknown) tafsīr
author Baqī b. Makhlad is praised. This author makes an appearance all of a sudden in
Manāhil al-ʿirfān of al-Zurqānī,58 in which he is grouped by al-Zurqānī with
al-Ṭabarī, Abū’l-Layth al-Samarqandī (d. 373/983), al-Suyūṭī, Ibn Kathīr, al-Baghawī,

al-Wāḥidī (as the author of Asbāb al-nuzūl, a rather isnād-conservative work of tafsīr)
and finally a work by Abū Jaʿfar al-Naḥḥās on abrogation.59 All these authors by then
have been published in Cairo, and all were becoming major figures in the genre of
tafsīr.60 To group Baqī b. Makhlad with this constellation when his work was lost and
his reputation yet to be established is only explicable in terms of the influence of Ibn
Taymiyya’s judgement. From now on a lost author of tafsīr will be mentioned
consistently by the Salafī historians.
The last major development in the use of the term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr came with its
movement to English-language tafsīr studies. Harris Birkeland will use the term in his
Old Muslim Opposition Against the Interpretation of the Koran (published in 1955)
thus instituting a remarkable development in our analysis of tafsīr. The term is now
fully entrenched on the two sides of the historiography of tafsīr, in the Arab world,
and in the West. A confusion has ensued since, in which we all are cognisant of the
inadequacies of this term, yet since we are all under the illusion that it is an old native
analytical term, we are obliged to abide by it and try to understand what Muslims
meant by it. The irony is that this term is of recent appearance, and as such is
analytically useless unless a clear understanding of the genealogy of the term has been
established.
The most important implication of understanding the genealogy of this term is that we
refrain from using it to understand the history of tafsīr, and as such use other terms
that are more reflective of the history and characteristics of the genre. One of course
has to study the use of the term in the modern Islamic historiography of tafsīr in order
to understand how Muslims were refashioning the genre, but one has to be careful if
one wishes to continue to use the term for analytical purposes. When the term
disappears from our analytical tools we realise that the story of tafsīr has far more
central issues animating it than we have so far been aware. The birth of philology and
the invention of grammar early on in the history of Islamic civilisation meant that the
hermeneutical discourse was always connected to philological reflections. As such the
story of tafsīr is far more intimately tied to philology than is the case if we insist on
using the term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr as an intrinsic lens to assess the history of the
genre by it. Whatever tafsīr by riwāya there was, it was subsumed under philology.
Sunnism had more urgent battles to fight than catering to its radical fringe – in this
light the fight against the Kharijīs is the early political struggle that foreshadows the
behaviour of Sunnism intellectually: a resistance to radical resolutions that closed the
gate of salvation to the majority of the Muslims, or rendered Sunnism intellectually
inane. Philology could not be fought off, it has to be embraced.
The entrenchment of the term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr in the history of tafsīr thus has
much to do with the fact that it is used to refer to two radical phases in the history of
the genre that were conflated and collapsed into one. The early resistance to tafsīr
bi’l-raʾy created the presumption that mainstream Sunnī tafsīr was the opposite,
something like al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr, which was not the case. Mainstream Sunnī
hermeneutics refused this radical understanding of tafsīr, although it did keep the
terms of the early phase. This fringe movement reaches a high point in the fourth/
tenth century and was only resuscitated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, on the crest of a second wave of radical hermeneutics. The resurrection
of this movement was accompanied by a relabelling of the Sunnī tradition as one
that was and ought to have been something like al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr. This
historiographic reconfiguring of tafsīr was so potent that it penetrated the English
language understanding of the history of the genre, and the term has become an
established analytical term despite the continuous unhappiness with it expressed by
most scholars.
NOTES
1 Muḥammad al-Dhahabī, al-Tafsīr wa’l-mufassirūn, 4th edn (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Wahba, 1989).
2 Reprinted in his al-Aʿmāl al-kāmila (10 vols, Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀma li’l-Kitāb,
1995).
3 Ibrāhīm Rufayda, al-Naḥw wa-kutub al-tafsīr (2 vols, Binghāzī: n.p., 1982).
4 Al-Fāḍil b. ʿĀshūr, al-Tafsīr wa-rijāluhu (Tunis: Dār al-Kutub al-Sharqiyya, 1966).
5 Al-Fihris al-shāmil li’l-turāth al-ʿArabī al-Islāmī al-makhṭūṭ, ʿulūm al-Qurʾān: makhṭūṭāt
al-tafsīr (12 vols, Amman: Muʾassasat Āl al-Bayt, 1987).
6 On this introduction see my ‘Ibn Taymiyya and the Rise of Radical Hermeneutics: An
Analysis of “An Introduction to the Foundation of Quranic Exegesis”’ in Shahab Ahmed and
Yossef Rapoport (eds), Ibn Taymiyya and His Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
pp. 123–62.
7 It is interesting to note that the first printing of al-Ṭabarī’s Qur’an commentary was the direct
result of assistance from the prince of Najd of the Āl al-Rashīd.
8 See my ‘Marginalia and the Periphery: A Tunisian Modern Historian and the History of
Qur’an Exegesis’, Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 58 (2011),
forthcoming.
9 See my Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition: The Qurʾān Commentary of al-Thaʿlabī
(D. 427/1035) (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
10 See my Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition, pp. 14–16.
11 See Amīn al-Khūlī, al-Tafsīr, p. 216.
12 Isaiah Goldfeld called these type of tafsīr works ‘collective commentaries’. See his
‘The Development of Theory on Qurʾānic Exegesis in Islamic Scholarship’, Studia Islamica 67
(1988), pp. 5–27, at p. 6.
13 Ignaz Goldziher, Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung (Leiden: Brill, 1970,
reprint of 1920 edition).
14 Harris Birkeland, ‘Old Muslim Opposition Against Interpretation of the Koran’,
Avhandlinger utgitt av det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi I Oslo. II Hist.-Filos. Klasse. 1955,
No. 1, pp. 1–42.
15 Al-Qāḍī, ʿAbd al-Jabbār, al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-tawḥīd wa’l-ʿadl: iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, ed.
Amīn al-Khūlī (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 1960), vol. 16, pp. 345–6. It is an irony of fate that
al-Khūlī was the editor of this volume: the editing of Muʿtazilī texts became the subversive act
of the defeated.
16 Al-Shawkānī, Fatḥ al-Qadīr (6 vols, Beirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 13–16.
17 Note the exquisite remark made by ʿĀmir b. ʿAlī al-ʿArābī in his introduction to his edition
of al-Iklīl fī istinbāṭ al-tanzīl (3 vols, Jeddah: Dār al-Andalus al-Khaḍrāʾ, 2002), vol. 1, p. 179,
n. 2, while discussing the Qur’an commentary of Ibn ʿAṭiyya: ‘Dr al-Dhahabī counted this book
as one of the commentaries in the style of al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr, I thought the same, basing my
opinion on his judgement, only to realise that it is actually a commentary of the style of al-tafsīr
bi’l-raʾy’. The ‘Dr al-Dhahabī’ he is referring to is no one else but our man, the historian of the
field. Al-ʿArabī was correct in detecting the contradictions in the use of this term. To the
hardcore Salafī ideologues, al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr should be al-tafsīr bi’l-riwāya, understood to
be transmission from the Salaf early three generations only. The muddle was unacceptable.
18 Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān (30 vols, Cairo: Muṣṭafā al-Bābī
al-Ḥalabī, 1968), vol. 1, p. 33.
19 Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, vol. 1, pp. 34–5.
20 Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, vol. 1, p. 41.
21 For internal Islamic polemics over the status of grammar and philology, see al-Ṭūfī,
al-Ṣaʿqa al-ghaḍabiyya fī’l-radd ʿalā munkirī al-ʿArabiyya, ed. Mūḥammad Fāḍil (Riyadh:
Maktabat al-ʿUbaykān, 1997).
22 For a detailed discussion of the ‘books of tafsīr’ in the ḥadīth collections see the
introduction in Ṣabrī al-Shāfiʿī and Sayyid al-Jalīmī (eds), Tafsīr al-Nasāʾī (2 vols, Beirut:
Muʾassasat al-Kutub al-Thaqāfiyya, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 103–8.
23 See R. Marston Speight, ‘The Function of ḥadīth as Commentary on the Qur’ān, as Seen in
the Six Authoritative Collections’ in Andrew Rippin (ed.), Approaches to the History of the
Interpretation of the Qurʾān (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 74.
24 Speight, ‘The Function of ḥadīth’, p. 74.
25 For Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī, see Eerik Dickinson, The Development of Early Sunnite
Ḥadīth Criticism: The Taqdima of Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (240/854–327/938), (Leiden: Brill,
2001).
26 Ibn Abī Ḥātim would like us to believe that he is willing to extend the Salaf two generations
more, to the followers of the followers and their followers (five generations in total). In effect he
is only concerned with the first three (including the Prophet as a generation).
27 This translation is by Eerick Dickinson from his The Development of Early Sunnite Ḥadīth
Criticism, p. 37 with some modifications. See the original in Ibn Abī Ḥātim, Tafsīr Ibn Abī
Ḥātim, ed. Aḥmad al-Zahrānī (2 vols, Medina: Maktabat al-Dār, 1987), vol. 1, p. 9.
28 On Ibn Mardawayh see Saleh, Formation, p. 3n., p. 210, p. 217n., p. 226.
29 On Abū’l-Shaykh see Brockelmann, GAL I, p. 195, SI, p. 347; Sezgin, GAS, vol. 1,
pp. 200–1. See also the introduction to the edition of his work Akhlāq al-nabī wa-ādābihi,
ed. Ṣāliḥ al-Wanīyān (4 vols, Riyadh: Dār al-Muslim, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 7–44; see also the
introduction to the edition of his work Kitāb al-ʿaẓama, ed. Riḍā Allāh al-Mubārkfūrī (5 vols,
Riyadh: Dār al-ʿĀṣima, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 49–100.
30 Efforts to revive his legacy are underway in Saudi Arabia; see the introduction in his work
Siyar al-salaf al-ṣāliḥīn, ed. Karam b. Aḥmad (4 vols, Riyadh: Dār al-Rāya, 1999), vol. 1,
pp. 1–242.
31 On Baqīy b. Makhlad, see Sezgin, GAS, vol. 1, pp. 152–3, with more references there.
32 The reference is from Dickinson, The Development of Early Sunnite Ḥadīth Criticism, p. 36.
For the text of the Arabic see Ibn Kathīr, al-Bidāya wa’l-nihāya, ed. ʿAbd Allāh al-Turkī
(Cairo: Dār Hajr, 1998), vol. 15, p. 113; ‘wa-lahu al-tafsīr al-ḥāfil alladhī ishtamala ʿalā’l-naql
al-kāmil alladhī yurbī fīhi ʿalā tafsīr Ibn Jarīr wa-ghayrihi min al-mufassirīn’.
33 On Ibn Taymiyya’s attempt to reposition these authors as the central figures in tafsīr, see
note 6.
34 Ibn Taymiyya, Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr, ed. ʿAdnān al-Zarzūr (Kuwait: Dār al-Qurʾān
al-Karīm, 1971), pp. 79–80.
35 For a transliteration of the list see Saleh, ‘Ibn Taymiyya and the Rise of Radical
Hermeneutics’, n. 59.
36 See the introduction to the Dār al-Shaʿb edition of Ibn Kathīr’s Tafsīr, in which a history of
the work is outlined: Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ghunaym et al.
(Cairo: al-Shaʿb, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 3–10.
37 The issue of the history of the composition of Ibn Kathīr’s Qur’an commentary is not yet
fully investigated. The standard printed edition of the work, whether the early Egyptian edition
or the Saudi edition (2000) is a uniform text. The situation becomes complicated when we draw
into the picture the edition based on the al-Azhar Tafsīr 168 MS, which lacks the citations from
other Qur’an commentaries beside that of al-Ṭabarī or Ibn Abī Ḥātim. The matter needs to be
thoroughly investigated. There seems to be an early copy of the work in Mecca, which might
solve the problem. For the Dār al-Shaʿb edition, see Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, ed.
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ghunaym et al. (Cairo: al-Shaʿab, 1971), p. 62.
38 For the standard versions of Ibn Kathīr’s commentary, see Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm
(4 vols, Cairo: n.p, n.d., reprinted Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1980), vol. 1, p. 40; see also the now
‘critical’ edition, Muḥammad Muṣṭafā al-Sayyid et al. (eds), Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm (15 vols,
Cairo: Muʾassasat Qurṭuba, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 262–3. For the citation from al-Qurṭubī, compare
with al-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-Qurʾān, 3rd edn (20 vols, Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1967),
vol. 1, pp. 160–2. For al-Qurṭubī’s citations from al-Thaʿlabī, see al-Kashf wa’l-bayān ʿan
tafsīr al-Qurʾān, ed. Abū Muḥammad b. ʿĀshūr (ʿAlī ʿĀshūr) (10 vols, Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ
al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 142–3.
39 Ismāʿīl ʿAbd al-ʿĀl, Ibn Kathīr wa-manhajuhu fī’l-tafsīr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Malik Fayṣal,
1984), pp. 451–2.
40 Cf. the same aya, Q. 2:2, in al-Suyūṭī, al-Durr al-manthūr, ed. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd
al-Muḥsin al-Turkī (25 vols, Cairo: Markaz Hajr, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 130–7.
41 Meir M. Bar-Asher, Scripture and Exegesis in Early Imāmī Shīʿism (Leiden: Brill, 1999);
see also now Etan Kholberg and Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi (eds), Revelation and
Falsification: The Kitāb al-qirāʾāt of Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Sayyārī, Critical Edition with an
Introduction and Notes (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
42 For literature see the article ‘Exegesis’ in Encyclopaedia Iranica.
43 See the edition of ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd et al., al-Wasīṭ (4 vols, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub
al-ʿIlmiyya, 1994), vol. 1, p. 50. For a detailed discussion of this word and an English
translation of the paragraph in which it appears see my ‘The Last of the Nishapuri School of
Tafsīr: al-Wāḥidī (d. 468/1076) and His Significance in the History of Qur’anic Exegesis’,
Journal of the American Oriental Society 126 (2006), pp. 223–43, at pp. 235–6.
44 The response of al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār to the triad theory can be read in his al-Mughnī,
vol. 16 (Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān), pp. 361–2. The title of his refutation reads: ‘A Chapter on the Fact
that Knowing the Intentions and Meanings of God in the Qur’an is not a Privilege that is
Preserved for Muḥammad or the Salaf (faṣl fī anna murād Allāh bi’l-Qurʾān lā yakhtaṣṣ
bi-maʿrifat al-rasūl wa-lā al-salaf)’.
45 See Kristin Zahra Sands, Ṣūfī Commentaries on the Qurʾān in Classical Islam (London:
Routledge, 2006), p. 33. For the Arabic text, see al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾʿulūm al-dīn (Cairo: Maṭbaʿa
al-ʿUthmāniyya, 1933), vol. 1, p. 256, lines 8–10: ‘an yakūn qad qarʾ tafsīran ẓāhiran
wa-iʿtaqada annahu lā maʿnā li-kalimāt al-Qurʾān illā mā tanāwalahu al-naql ʿan Ibn ʿAbbās
wa-Mujāhid wa-ghayrihimā anna mā warāʾ dhālik tafsīr bi’l-raʾy’. For al-Ghazālī’s defence of
the freedom of the exegete, see Sands, Ṣūfī Commentaries, pp. 47–50.
46 See my ‘Ibn Taymiyya and the Rise of Radical Hermeneutics’.
47 Muḥammad Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān, Fatḥ al-bayān fī maqāṣid al-Qurʾān (10 vols, Cairo:
Būlāq, 1294/1877), reissued by the Būlāq press in 1302, also published in Iran in 1294
in 4 vols.
48 Al-Shawkānī, Tafsīr (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1349/1930).
49 Al-Suyūṭī, al-Durr al-manthūr (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Maymaniyya, 1314/1896). The editor
was Muḥammad al-Zahrī al-Ghamrāwī, who was then called muṣaḥḥiḥ. All editions of al-Durr
go back to this edition and its editor, an Azharī scholar who is never mentioned or credited
(see vol. 6, p. 424 for the colophon of the edition), and about whom I was unable to find any
information. He has also published a sharḥ on al-Nawawī’s al-Minhāj called al-Sirāj al-wahhāj
(Cairo: Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1352/1933), the colophon of which mentions that it was
finished in 1337/1918.
50 Reprinted in Beirut by Dār al-Maʿrifa (see the 1980 edition for example).
51 Dār al-Manār.
52 The earliest publication date for this work I have been able to find is 1359/1940, for an
edition published by Maṭbaʿat Shabra in Cairo. There were also editions published by Dār Iḥyāʾ
al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya (ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī), the third edition of which is the one available in
research libraries. Since the author Muḥammad ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm al-Zurqānī quoted from the
Muqaddima of Ibn Taymiyya it is clear that the first al-Bābī edition could not have come out
before 1936, the year of the publication of Ibn Taymiyya’s Muqaddima; for quotations from the
Muqaddima in Manāhil, see vol. 1, p. 492 and p. 496 of the edition cited in note 34.
53 Al-Zurqānī, Manāhil al-ʿirfān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān (Cairo: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya,
n.d., probably 1953), vol. 1, p. 479; for the heading with al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr, see vol. 1,
p. 480.
54 Al-Zurqānī, Manāhil al-ʿirfān, vol. 1, pp. 491–512. The textbook is attempting the
impossible: keeping both the old Ashʿarī understanding of tafsīr and the Ibn Taymiyya
paradigm. The coexistence of the two is jarring, and ultimately the more Salafī approach gets
the better share.
55 ʿAlī Ḥasan ʿAbd al-Qādir, al-Madhāhib al-Islāmiyya fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān, Ajnats Jūld Tisīhr,
tr. ʿAlī Ḥasan ʿAbd al-Qādir (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-ʿUlūm, 1363/1944), p. hāʾ, p. 51.
56 ʿAbd al-Qādir, al-Madhāhib al-Islāmiyya, p. alif.
57 See Ibn Taymiyya, Muqaddima (Damascus: Maṭbaʿat al-Tarraqī, 1936), p. 34. The reprint
by al-Maṭbaʿa al-Salafiyya, Cairo (1950 print), actually supplies a fatwā by Ibn Taymiyya on
the most sound of Qur’an commentaries, see this edition, pp. 56–8.
58 Al-Zurqānī, Manāhil, vol. 1, pp. 498–9.
59 Al-Zurqānī, Manāhil, vol. 1, pp. 498–9.
60 Al-Naḥḥās’s work on abrogation, Kitāb al-nāsikh wa’l-mansūkh was published in Cairo in
1905.
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Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of tafsīr in

Article in Journal of Qur anic Studies · October 2010

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Histories of tafsīr in the Arab World

Journal of Qur’anic Studies 12 (2010): 6–40

wa’l-mufassirūn,1 (ii) the al-Tafsīr: maʿālim ḥayātihi – manhajuhu al-yawm of

(al-Miqdād al-Suyūrī, d. 826/1423) and Zaydī (Yūsuf b. Aḥmad al-Yamānī al-Zaydī,

Al-Dhababī’s recourse to such a large number of exegetes remains unmatched in the

To appreciate the sweeping nature of the victory of this reiteration of a staunchly

The Modernist movement of historiography continues to be relevant through the

The Beleaguered Ashʿarī Traditional Camp

Theoretical Considerations Based on the Historiography of tafsīr in the

Tafsīr is a genealogical literature insofar as it is a genre that has always been

tafsīr. Hence, al-Baghawī, whose Qur’an commentary is usually mentioned in passing

The third type of tafsīr work is the ḥāshiya-style commentary. These

al-tawḥīd wa’l-ʿadl. It offers a truncated, albeit accurate, account of the hermeneutical

Know that the opponents from amongst the nonbelievers, while

Al-Qāḍī is pretending to report on the hermeneutical currents in Islam, but in reality he

When the Sunnī hermeneutical paradigm came to be fully articulated, whether by

the Prophet – Companion – Successor paradigm in spite of the rejection by the

A group of my brethren asked me to produce a Qur’an commentary,

There is an unexplained mystery in the medieval Islamic intellectual history: why

was an essential element in refashioning the hermeneutical landscape of modern

A History of the Term al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr

The ﬁrst inkling of a change in the hermeneutical sophistication of this beleaguered

Tradition, riwāya, and That of Rational Reasoning, dirāya’). The introduction is

The cumulative effect of the works as they appeared in publication is a remarkable

Al-Dhahabī’s history is thus a turning point in the history of tafsīr historiography.

al-Ṭabarī, Abū’l-Layth al-Samarqandī (d. 373/983), al-Suyūṭī, Ibn Kathīr, al-Baghawī,

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