Saleh Historiography of Tafsir

Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of
tafslr in Arabic: A History of the

Book Approach
Walid A. Saleh
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
Since all the extensive histories of the tafslr 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
Ashcari, the Salari, and the modernist. Identifying these camps is essential if we desire
to understand the manner in which tafslr studies has been approached so far, since the
proponents of all three have produced, and continue to produce, the editions of tafslr
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-tafslr bVl-ma^hür' which has come
to play a key role in the categorisation of tafäslr. Charting the historiography of tafslr,
moreover, is here undertaken in conjunction with discussion of the history of
publications of editions of tafslr in the Arab world. In other words, a history of the
editions themselves as eventful milestones in a historiography of tafslr is the primary
means through which I attempt to understand this selfsame historiography.
Histories of tafslr in the Arab World
The historiography of tafslr 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 tafslr 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) Muhammad al-Dhahabf s, al-Tafslr
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 taf sir in Arabic 7
wa'1-mufassirün,1 (ii) the al-Tafslr: macälim hayätihi - manhajuhu al-yawm of

Amin al-Khulï,2 (iii) al-Nahw wa-kutub al-tafslr by Ibrahim Rufayda,3 (iv) Ibn
c
Äshür's al-Tafsïr wa-rijäluhu4 and (ν) al-Fihris al-shämil Wl-turäth al-cArabi al-
Isläml al-makhtüt, culüm al-QurJän: makhtütät al-tafslr.5 The first is the well-known
work by Muhammad al-Dhahabï, al-Tafslr wa'1-mufassirün. This three-volume
history is the earliest and most influential survey of tafslr in the twentieth century,
which, like many modern studies on tafslr, was originally written as a dissertation,
submitted to al-Azhar University in 1946. Al-Dhahabfs 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 tafslr, 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-Zarkashï and al-Suyutï, through
the latter's work al-Itqänfl culüm al-Qur°än. 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-Dhahabï's conceptual outlook is the influence of Ibn
Taymiyya's (d. 728/1328) theory of the history of tafslr, which supplied the
philosophical underpinnings of al-Dhahabï's work. This, then, is a Salati history
which reaffirms the revelatory and transcendent nature of the Qur'an.
Al-Dhahabï divides the history of the genre into three periods: 'the Prophet and the
Companions'; 'the Successors'; and 'the Age of Writing' (casr al-tadwln) - 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 tafslr bVl-ma°thür ('tradition-
based interpretation') and tafslr bVl-ra°y ('deductive or rational interpretation') as the
organising principle of his work. This categorisation of tafslr is not only decidedly
Sunnï (of the Salati type), hence ideological, but it is also without analytical value.
Tafslr bïl-ra3y is further divided into two categories; the permissible kind {al-tafslr
bi!-ra°y al-jä°iz) and the arbitrary heretical kind {tafslr bVl-ra3y al-madhmüm or
tafslr al-firaq al-mubtadica), two value judgements which stem from a modern Salati
sensibility, since many works damned as heretical were popular in medieval Sunnï
circles. Al-Dhahabï's work has no qualms about its staunchly Salati outlook.
Volume one is preserved for what one could call approved Sunnï authors and
methods. Al-Dhahabï first discusses eighteen Sunnï exegetes, eight of whom are
banded under the salutary rubric al-tafslr bVl-ma°thür, these being al-Tabari
(d. 311/923), al-Samarqandï (d. 375/985), al-Thaclabï (d. 427/1035), al-Baghawï
(d. 516/1122), Ibn cAtiyya (d. 542/1148), Ibn Kathïr (d. 774/1372), al-Thacâlibï
(d. 875/1470) and al-Suyûtï (d. 911/1505, here as the author of al-Durr al-manthür).
The other ten Sunnï exegetes are banded together under the rubric al-tafslr bVl-ra°y
al-jä0iz ('permissible reasoned interpretation'), these being Fakhr al-Dïn al-Razï
8 Journal of Qur'anic Studies
(d. 604/1207), al-Baydâwï (d. 791/1388), al-Nasafì (d. 710/1310), al-KMzin (d.
725/1324), Abu Hayyân al-Gharnâtï (d. 745/1344), al-Naysäbüri (d. 728/1328),
al-Suyûtï (here as the author of Tafsïr al-Jalälayn), al-Khatïb al-Sharbïnï (d. 977/
1569), Abü'l-Sucüd (d. 982/1574) and al-Alusï (d. 1270/1854). The last part of this
first volume is dedicated to authors who were part of what al-Dhahabï considered
al-tafsïr bi'l-raJy al-madhmüm, or 'unacceptable reasoned interpretation'. These turn
out to be Muctazilï authors who were either Sunnï or ShïcI. Al-Dhahabï includes three
exegetes under this rubric: al-Qâdï cAbd al-Jabbär (d. 415/1025), al-Sharif al-Murtadä
(d. 436/1044) and al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1144). Here al-Zamakhshari is ostracised
formally after being the centre of the Sunnï curriculum.
The second volume contains sections covering the Shïcï, Sufi, legal, philosophical and
modern interpretive traditions. The section dealing with the legal interpretive tradition
contains the only markedly Sunnï material in this volume, otherwise we have a neatly
divided history: volume one is for Sunnï approved works and volume two is for
mostly non-Sunnï works. The authors discussed in the Twelver Shïcï sections are: the
author of Mir3at al-anwär wa-mishkät al-asrär (who is not clearly identified - he is
actually Abü'1-Hasan b. Muhammad Tâhir cAmilï, d. 1137/1725), al-Hasan al-cAskarï
(d. 260/873), al-Tabrisï (d. 548/1154), al-Fayd al-Kâshï (d. 1091/1680), Shubbar
(d. 1239/1824) and Sultan Muhammad (d. 1909). This is a remarkable coverage from
a Sunnï scholar of the Shïcï exegetical tradition, traditionally not the done thing. The
selection is dictated by what Shïcï 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 Ismâcïlï
and BahâDï hermeneutical traditions, although the quality of these chapters is
unsatisfactory, one on Zaydï tafsïr (which is significant since it covers the work of
al-Shawkânï (d. 1250/1834)), and a chapter on Khârijï hermeneutics which remains
unique to this day, since it covers the Qur'an commentary of Muhammad b. Yüsif
Attafayyash (d. 1332/1914). (I have not seen this massive work discussed anywhere
before, although it is the most extensive Khârijï Ibâdï commentary we have.)
The Sufi tradition is also covered extensively, indeed the authors covered here are the
most important representatives of the Sufi interpretive tradition (al-Tustari (d. 283/
896), al-Sulami (d. 412/1021), Rözbihän al-Baqlï (d. 606/1209), the Kubrawï tradition
including Najm al-Dïn al-Dâya (d. 654/1256) and cAlä3 al-Dawla al-Simnânï (d. 736/
1336) and the commentary attributed to Ibn al-c Arabi), and the coverage is such that
this chapter has withstood the passage of time. In the section on philosophical
interpretations al-Dhahabï discusses al-Fârâbï, the Ikhwân al-Safa and Ibn Sïnâ, 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 ahkäm al-QurJän
genre, which includes a discussion of Sunnï (al-Jassäs, d. 370/980; al-Kiyä al-Harrâsï,
d. 504/1110; Ibn al-cArabï al-Mâlikï, d. 543/1148; and al-Qurtubï, d. 671/1272), Shïcï
(al-Miqdâd al-Suyüri, d. 826/1423) and Zaydï (Yüsuf b. Ahmad al-Yamânï al-Zaydi,

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-Dhahabï discusses the work of al-Tantâwï al-Jawhari), the sectarian (namely in the
form of a list of Shïcï modern exegetes which hardly goes beyond naming them), the
blasphemous (which discusses the confiscated, and thus unavailable, work al-Hidäya
wa'l-cirfànfì taf sir al-Qur3än bïl-Qur3an, and al-Dhahabï deigns to name the author
who goes unnamed - he is actually Muhammad Abu Zayd), the literary social (which
covers the traditional reformist school in tafslr. the school of Muhammad cAbduh
and his students and followers Muhammad Rashïd Rida and Muhammad Mustafa
al-Murâghï). Al-Dhahabï 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 Azhari opposition to the literary approach to the Qur'an pioneered in
the Arabic department of Cairo University (Fu3ad al-Awwal University before the
Egyptian Revolution).
The third volume of al-Tafslr, which came out posthumously, contains al-Dhahabfs
teaching notes from his years in Baghdad. The significance of this volume is that it
sheds light on the personal interests of this Sunnï scholar, who seems to have
developed a fascination with non-Sunnï sects. However, in itself, it adds little to the
two previous volumes.
Even this quick survey of al-Dhahabï's work clearly shows the massive effort
undertaken by this scholar in his attempt to give a comprehensive picture of the genre
of tafslr. The coverage of Shïcï hermeneutics is remarkable regardless of the quality of
the analysis done in these chapters; the Islamic hermeneutical tradition is gathered
together in al-Dhahabï's work in its entirety. Sunnism had never cared before to offer
others this platform. Clearly the aim was comprehensiveness. Al-Dhahabï utilised not
only printed sources but also unpublished works, thus offering the first detailed survey
of tafslr 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
tafslr was actually Amin al-Khûlï, for more on whom see below). To give just two
examples out of many unpublished works that were discussed by al-Dhababï in the
Tafslr, he was one of the first to address al-Thaclabï's al-Kashf wa'1-bayän; he also
gave an extensive description of the work of Ibn cAtiyya (d. 542/1148), an author who
was highlighted by Amin al-Khûlï already (this was before the publication of Ibn
c
Atiyya's work in the 1970s). The chapter on Sufi hermeneutics, to give one further
example, utilised three manuscript works, making this chapter still relevant 70 years
after its publication.
Al-Dhababf 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 Salafì paradigm that was
never reflective of the historical developments of the genre; it fails to situate tafslr in
the larger picture of the Islamic religious tradition; moreover, it is silent about the
contributions of tafslr 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-Dhahabf 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 tafslr. From now on the 'Ibn
Taymiyyan' paradigm was the prism through which tafslr'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 Azhari establishments from which it has yet to recover.
The story of the rise to eminence of Salafì ideology began in 1936 in Damascus when
the Muqaddima fi usui al-tafslr, a hitherto inconsequential work by Ibn Taymiyya,
was published by the Hanbalï muftì of the city. This publication was one
manifestation of the modern Salafì 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 Salafì movement was the reclamation of the Qur'an from
the scholastic Ashcarî Sunnï tradition (the second historiographie current in the Arab
world). This was accomplished through a concerted effort to reposition the Qur'an
commentaries of al-Tabari, Ibn Kathfr and (less so) that of al-Baghawi, as the centre
of the tafslr enterprise - a very late enactment of the program proposed in the
Muqaddima of Ibn Taymiyya. This meant a displacement of the al-Baydâwï - al-
Zamakhsharï - al-Räzi triad from the position at the centre of tafslr seminary
education it had occupied since the seventh Hijrï century. The battle was part of
an internal Islamic struggle over hermeneutics being fought by three competing
paradigms: the scholastic, previously Azharï, hermeneutical approach of al-
Zamakhsharï - al-Baydâwï; the new Salati Ibn Taymiyyan approach which
eventually swept over the Azharî 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
Muhammad c Abduh, which was picked up by the secular Arab nationalist modernists
of Fu°ad al-Awwal University, lacked sufficent religious credentials and stood little
chance to influence the battle.
The Modernist Camp and its Struggle with the Salati Camp
To appreciate the sweeping nature of the victory of this reiteration of a staunchly

Salati hermeneutical approach to the Qur'an, and consequently to an understanding of
what taf sir is about, one only has to read the now unread study al-Tafslr: macälim
hayätihi - manhajuhu al-yawm of Amïn al-Khûlï, the leading proponent of the
modernist literary nationalist approach to the Qur'an. Al-Khûlï published his history
of taf sir 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 taf sir
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 taf sir. 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 taf sir. Al-Khûlï's translation of the German title as
ittijähät al-tafslr ('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
Salati camp which was trying to shove the Salati paradigm down the collective throats
of Arab intellectuals.
Al-Khüli'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-kitäb al-cArabiyya 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-Khülfs 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 Azhari establishment, now turned
Salati, was far more adept at keeping the Qur'an as its exclusive prerogative.
The Qur'an was repositioned squarely in a Salafì paradigm where the hermeneutical
tools were unequivocally restricted to a hadlth-inhented mode: a privileging of the
ancestral voice above and beyond any other voice.
It is remarkable how different the positions of al-Khuïï (an Azharï shaykh by training)
were from those of the Azharï al-Dhahabï (al-Dhahabï by the way was keenly aware
of al-KhülFs booklet and he cited it in his work). Al-Khulï could hardly contain his
disdain for the attempt to present taf sir in the language of the medieval scholars;
the methods of the old traditions were hardly useful now, undertaking tafslr 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-Tafsïr bi'l-maJthür (al-KMlï actually used 'tafslr al-riwäya\ the more common
term before tafslr bi Ί-ma 'thür 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-Khûlï enjoyed recounting
how untrustworthy all the authorities of early tafslr were, thus undermining any claim
to legitimacy for inherited tafslr material. He mocked the Azharï scholars (ashyäkh al-
Azhar, using a sarcastic plural for the word shaykh instead of the more common
shuyükh) for their effort to expunge IsräJlliyyät from the tafslr corpus. lsrä°lliyyät are
a slight danger ('amr yasir al-khatar'), he sardonically reassures them. What needs
to be undertaken with Isrä "lliyyät 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-Khûlï are just a few examples
which illustrate the unbridgeable gap between the secularist nationalist understanding
of the heritage of tafslr and the traditional Azharis.
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
Salafì 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 tafslr tradition such as
al-Râzï or al-Zamakhshari. Indeed, exponents of the Salafì paradigm remained
puzzled and unable to understand how the Sunnï establishment, represented through
the madrasa curriculum, enshrined the Muctazilï al-Zamakhshari and his imitator
al-Baydâwï. 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.
Tafslr historiography in the Arab world was conscious of the latest developments in
Orientalism and soon incorporated Goldziher's classical study on taf sir 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 tafslr 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 madäris 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-Baydâwï,
al-Zamkhasharî and al-Râzï 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 hawäshl ('supercommentaries'). The publication of this
corpus thus remains the strongest expression of the old mainstream scholastic tradition
of tafslr. 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 tafslr corpus belongs to this scholastic Ashcarï
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
Salati movement with its beloved Islamic past. As the Salati movement acquired the
trappings of higher education, it found itself the new champion of turäth, 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 Salati 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-Nahw wa-kutub al-tafslr by Ibrahim 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 tafslr. It divides tafslr 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
Sunnï grammatical scholastic tradition we have (he discusses only one Shïcï Qur'an
commentary), and it attempts to follow the history of tafslr through the lens of the
grammatical approach to the Qur'an. Like al-Dhahabï, Rufayda consulted many
manuscript copies of Qur'an commentaries, thus making his history an indispensable
tool for scholars of tafslr. The main feature of this work is that it does not forget the
role of the häshiya as part of the medieval scholastic tradition of tafslr - although it
offers no systematic study of this subgenre. The real significance of Rufayda's work is
the fact that it is not a Salati 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
tafsïr studies, but so far has met with no recognition whatsoever.
The authors discussed by Rufayda are: Abü cUbayda (d. 210/825), al-Farrä0 (d. 207/
822), al-Zajjäj (d. 311/923), Abu cAlï al-Fârisï (d. 377/987), al-Nahhäs (d. 338/950),
Ibn Khälawayh (d. 370/980), Ibn al-Jinnï (d. 392/1002), al-Rummanï (d. 384/994), al-
Naqqäsh (d. 351/962), al-Tabari, al-Hawfì (d. 430/1039), al-Mahdawï (d. 440/1048),
al-Wahidï (d. 468/1076), al-Zamakhsharï, Ibn cAtiyya, al-Tabrisï, al-Râzï, al-Qurtubï,
al-Kawashï (d. 680/1281), al-Baydâwï, al-Nasafì, al-Iskandarî (d. 741/1341), Abu
Hayyän al-Gharnâtï, al-Sïwasï (d. 860/1456), al-Suyutï, al-Thacâlibï al-Jaza°irï
(d. 875/1470), al-Kharrûbï al-Tarabulsï (d. 963/1556), al-Khatïb al-Shirbïnï (d. 977/
1569), Abü'l-Sucüd (d. 951/1355), al-KhafajI (d. 1069/1659), al-Karkhï (d. 1006/
1598), al-Jamal al-cUjaylï (d. 1204/1790), al-Shawkänl, al-ÄlüsI, Muhammad cAbduh
(d. 1323/1905) and al-Qâsimï (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 Abu Hayyän al-Gharnâtï to be the
apex of the genre of grammatical tafsïr. Given the underlying presumption of his
approach, one can easily understand this assessment to mean that Abu Hayyän was
also the summation of the genre. The choice of Abu Hayyän highlights the complexity
of issuing any historical judgements on tafsïr. Depending on what trend one is
investigating, one ends up with a different trajectory: the interwoven nature of tafsïr,
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-Shawkanï,
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 tafsïr
we have so far. In this sense the modernist movement continues to be of profound
relevance to the historiography of tafsïr in the Arab world despite the fact that it has
lost the cultural battle.
One of the major developments in the modern history of tafsïr has been the concerted
effort orchestrated by the Salati movement to revive the marginal tafsïr works of the
hadïth-onented kind. The publication of al-Tabari in 1905 was to prove a remarkable
gift to the Salati movement, not because this was a hadïth-based tafsïr work, but
because it was claimed as part of this movement (willy-nilly). Al-Tabari however was
never Salati enough for the Salatìs, 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 Kathïr's Qur'an commentary in a sumptuous edition
in 1924 by no less an editor than Muhammad Rashïd Rida with funds from no one
else but the now aspiring King of the Hijäz, al-Imäm c Abd Allah b. Sacüd. What is of
profound cultural significance about this edition is that the typesetting is decidedly
modern: this is not the old Buläq 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 tafslr work into a mainstream work.
Al-Tabarï 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 Kathïr
in the Salati enterprise. The sumptuous nine-volume edition of Ibn Kathïr was not
matched till 1939 when the Egyptian royal house would enter the competition - al-
Râzï, the bulwark of the madrasa tafslr curriculum, gets the honour earlier in 1932
when a thirty-volume edition of his tafslr came out (instead of the eight-volume or
six-volume editions of the nineteenth century).
When the article Tafsfr' 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 Amin al-Khûlï 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
tafslr in the Islamic world: 4[t]he commentary of al-Baidâwï (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 Kathïr's commentary that is now playing the role that was once
played by al-Baydawï's. Even al-Tabarï is unable to compete with Ibn Kathïr. Ibn
Kathïr's tafslr is so popular that one tends to forget how recent his ascent was in the
Islamic world.
The only problem that the Salari 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, Salali demands. However, the limitations of the
Salali program due to the scarce number of tafslr works that were truly hadlth-
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 Ashcari Traditional Camp
The response of the scholastic madrasa hermeneutical tradition was late in coming -
if only since there was always the confusion that the Salati movement was doing the
bidding of the traditionalist. The traditionalists had already lost their royal patron,
represented in King FüDäd al-Awwäl and his son Färüq. 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-Qurtubï 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-Tafslr wa-rijäluhu by the mufti of Tunisia, al-Fädil
b. cÄshür 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-Baydâwï and the scholastic supercommentary was
put at the centre of the history of taf sir by Ibn cÄshür.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 Salafïs, has history on its side,
however. Since most tafslr works belong to this tradition its voice is impossible to
silence. Nowadays, with the Salali movement becoming entrenched in university
systems in the Arab world, it has become the champion of the texts that belong to their
opponents, the Ashcari school. Every new medieval Qur'an commentary that is
published is a reaffirmation of the mainstream Islamic exegetical heritage, which
happens to be the Ashcari tradition.
The works I have discussed here represent a rich tradition of engagement with the
history of tafslr. 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 tafslr. The real problem is that these works are not part of the Western
academic history of tafslr. They remain, even when mentioned, inconsequential to our
understanding of the development of the genre. The gulf between the study of tafslr in
the West and the Islamic world is rendering the field of tafslr 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 tafslr, 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 tafsïr anytime soon. As far as
tafslr 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 tafslr 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 tafslr in 1944,
70 years before it would be translated into English, and many of the leading scholars
who are working on tafslr in the Anglo world have had no access to this classic of
tafslr 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 tafslr
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 Ashcarï camp. Though this is not a history
proper, it is actually the most important history we have of tafslr as a genre. Al-Fihris
al-shämil Wl-turäth al-1Arabi al-Isläml al-makhtüt, culüm al-Qur°än: makhtütät
al-tafslr is a detailed registry of all the titles of tafslr works and the corresponding
extant manuscripts available in the world, based on the catalogues of manuscript
collections. As far as tafslr 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-Baghawf s Qur'an commentary, one has to asses the meaning
of this number, and the significance of al-Baghawï in the history of tafslr. The same
applies to al-Tabari 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 tafslr 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-shämil
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 îafsïr 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 tafslr through the lens of social network analysis is
the best approach to the understanding of the history of this genre. As the field of
taf sir is too young to allow the gathering of complete statistical data to chart detailed
maps of tafslr 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.
Tafslr 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 tafslr material. Thus there was a Sufi
core, a Sunnï inherited core and a Shïcï 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. Tafslr 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 tafslr had to say.
Since philology became the foundational intellectual paradigm of medieval Islam,
philology remained the grand menace for the field of tafslr.
Let me give an example of what I mean by a core of inherited material. The Ibn
c
Abbäs (d. 69/688) Qur'anic interpretive corpus is one of the oldest in the taf sir
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-Zajjäj would become as essential a component of the tafslr core as Ibn c Abbäs
was, thus becoming a defining part of the tafslr corpus. As a matter of fact al-Zajjäj's
corpus will become one of the defining elements of the mainstream interpretive core
for most of the history of tafslr, and its addition to the core happened well after
al-Tabarfs lifetime, it was al-Thaclabi and his student al-Wahidï who made al-Zajjäj
the centre of their core, thus making clear that the core corpus was not a stable entity,
and was hardly defined by al-TabarL Compare that with the opinions of al-Tabari
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-Tabarfs commentary in 1905 did it become
an essential component of the modern tafslr core.
Defining tafslr 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 tafslr. A seventh-century Hijri exegete quoting an interpretation
from Ibn cAbbäs is not the same as al-Thaclabï quoting the same interpretative
lemma. Al-Thaclabï accessed Ibn cAbbäs directly, while the later exegete accessed
him through an intermediary, most probably al-Thaclabï himself, thereby turning
al-Thaclabi into a core corpus.
A history of tafslr has to be thus keenly aware of the developments in tafslr studies in
the Arab world, for they make possible real advances in our charting of the history of
taf sir. Hence, al-Baghawï, whose Qur'an commentary is usually mentioned in passing
in encyclopaedia entries on taf sir, if he is mentioned at all, becomes a very important
figure in light of my argument about the genealogical nature of taf sir, since he was
fundamental in solidifying the grip of the Nïshâpurï school on taf sir tradition through
his re-editing of the work of al-Thaclabï - al-Baghawï's taf sir was a reworking of
al-Thaclabf s taf sir. The large number of extant manuscripts of al-Baghawfs
commentary which, thanks to al-Fihris al-shämil, 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-Baghawï to edit the work of al-Thaclabï,
which indicates that he was fully aware of the influence and significance of the
Nïshapurï school.
The second methodological issue that I would like to discuss here is the classification
of tafslr works. Since tafslr literature is an integrative literature, any attempt to
classify tafslr works according to content is counter-productive. Any given Qur'an
commentary, even the shortest, exhibits most of the characteristics of the genre.
Already, Amïn al-Khûlï has raised serious doubt about the usefulness of Goldziher's
classification of tafslr works according to content - primitive, traditional, dogmatic,
mystical, Sufi, 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-Tabari 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 tafslr 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 macänl, gharlb, qiräJät and icräb, etc.)
The first kind of tafslr work in this categorisation is the encyclopaedic (mutawwalät
al-tafslr)}2 This division includes the major summa works of tafslr. 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 tafslr, just as a hermeneutical
analysis of tafslr is. Examples of this kind of works are the works of al-Taban,
al-Maturîdï (d. 333/944), al-Thaclabï, al-Wahidï (as author of al-Baslt), al-Râzï, Ibn
c
Atiyya, al-Qurtubï, Abu Hayyän al-Gharnatï, etc.
The second type of tafsir 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 Sufi
Qur'an commentaries are grouped here. The need for the madrasa-style commentary
rose with the increased professionalisation of the craft of tafsir 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 tafsir 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 culama3.
Indeed, teaching tafsir 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-Wâhidï (as the author of al-Wasït), al-Zamakhsharï, al-Baydâwï,
al-Baghawï, al-Khäzin, Tafsir al-Jalälayn, etc.
The third type of tafsir work is the häshiya-style commentary. These

were supercommentaries that were written on three specific madrasa-style
commentaries - al-Zamakhsharï's al-Kashshäf al-Baydâwï's Anwär al-tanzil and the
Tafsir al-Jalälayn of al-Mahallï (d. 864/1459) and al-Suyûtï - used to teach tafsir in
the madrasa curriculum. The role of the häshiya in the history of tafsir is fundamental
since it is through the häshiya that the art of tafsir was assessed and developed.
These three categories of composition encompass the whole spectrum of tafsir works
since al-Tabarï. The division purposefully avoids any content description since most
of these commentaries were not monotone, nor was tafsir 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 tafsir 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 tafsir and a History of the Term al-tafsir bVl-ma3thür
Al-Qâdïc Abd al-Jabbär, one of the great Muctazilï theologians, offered a summary of
the Islamic hermeneutical attitudes to the Qur'an in his book al-Mughni fi abwäb
al-tawhïd wa'l-cadl. It offers a truncated, albeit accurate, account of the hermeneutical

landscape in Islam, which was undoubtedly tailored to serve al-Qädfs 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 taf sir,n Harris
Birkeland's corrective input,14 and al-Qädfs 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 (ghulät) and people who believe in
the inner reality (bätiniyya), describing and calling themselves
partisans (tashayyuc), 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 (cawwäm)
and the people of Tradition (hadïth). 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 Imam.'
Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of tafsir in Arabic 23
Some others said: 'the Qur'an, though it has no inner meanings, as the
batiniyya claim, nevertheless, its meaning is only known to the Imam
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 muhkam parts. As for the ambiguous parts {mutashäbih)
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 Imams or the Salaf.
Al-Qâdï 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 Shfism; 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 Sunnï and Shïcï radical movements. To the ultra-radical Sunnï the
Qur'an alone sufficed, it needed nothing and no one was needed to make it clear. To
the ultra-radical Shïcï the Qur'an was useless as such, it needed the Imam and without
the Imam it was nothing. Al-Qâdï 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 Shïcï paradigm, with the Imam
ultimately as the sole guardian of meaning.
The significance of this paragraph is that it leaves no doubt that the radical Sunnï
hermeneutical approach to the Qur'an has nothing to do with the mainstream Sunnï
interpretive tradition. Al-Qâdï's characterisation is not what Sunnï hermeneutics is or
was then. The Sunnïs would come up with their own term for their approach to the
interpretation of the Qur'an, al-tafslr bifl-cilm, 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
Sunnï paradigm, more importantly, has a negative term to describe the approach of
their enemies, al-tafslr bi!-raJy, and Sunnïs 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 Sunnï
authorities one was a practitioner of al-tafslr bi'l-cilm, if one was not, one was then
doing the other!
When the Sunnï hermeneutical paradigm came to be fully articulated, whether by

al-Tabarï, or by Muqätil b. Sulaymân (d. 150/767) or even as far back as the Ibn
c
Abbäs layer, Arabic language and the freedom of the exegete to ascertain the word of
God stood at the centre of this enterprise. The Jâhilï line of poetry was there bound to
the verse of God. This philological sensitivity was, however, bound to the core Sunnï
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, Sunnï
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 tafslr began to be written in the twentieth century, however,
confusion crept into the picture when the term al-tafslr bil-ma^thür was used to refer
to 'Sunnf mainstream hermeneutical practice. Al-Tabari is not a tafslr bi'l-maJthür
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-Tabarî was offering us in
his commentary. He is nevertheless the epitome of Sunnï tafslr. The introduction of
the term 'al-tafslr bïl-ma°thur' into the historiography of tafslr was the result of a
fascinating development that only now is becoming apparent. What has happened is
that the internal, modern, Sunnï struggles over hermeneutics, by lending a term to the
history of tafslr, shaped (or misshaped) the historiography of tafslr negatively (both in
the Arab world and in Western academia). A term that was first used by al-Suyûtï 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 Sunnï 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 Sunnï hermeneutical
practices, adding to the conundrum.
Thus, it is time to realise that this term, al-tafslr bil-ma°thür, 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 Sunnï hermeneutical tradition that
was always on the margins. After al-Suyûtï, al-Shawkânï came up with his own
term, al-tafslr bi'1-riwäya, 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 Sunnï hermeneutical tradition.16 Al-Shawkänfs term did not catch on,
but al-Suyûtï's did. Thus the term al-tafslr bVl-ma^thür was already envisioned
by Sunnï radicals as a means to reform Sunnï hermeneutical practice and not to
describe it. When it was picked up by the Azhari Salati historians it concluded
the final stage of a transformation of the hermeneutical landscape of the Sunnï
paradigm.
There is no need here to retell the story of the early opposition to tafslr, 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 tafslr did not die out in Islam, as most
scholars suggest - opposition to tafslr mutated into opposition to any tafslr beyond
Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of tafsïr in Arabic 25
those of the Salaf. Since Birkeland was not concerned with the post-Tabari history of
tafsïr, he was not aware of the continuous relevance of this hermeneutical stance
in Sunnï Islam, which he thought had been modified. The position of those who
considered tafsïr 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 Sunnï establishment. It remained a marginal and periodically effective
opposition to the Sunnï mainstream's hermeneutical compromise with philology.
This fringe movement in Sunnism remained robustly capable of resurrecting itself
periodically. Sunnï hermeneutical history thus has the seed of radicalism always
embedded in it.
The peculiar history of the term al-tafsïr bïl-ma°thur has meant that it has been used
to mean two different things. The first kind of tafsïr bi'l-maJthür: the radical tafsïr, as
used by the Azharï 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 tafsïr bVl-ma°thür is
used to refer to the Sunnï mainstream hermeneutical practice (the al-Tabarï kind), the
one we usually think of when we use this term. Added to this double meaning is the
fact that the radical Azharï Salafî historians also used the term to legitimise the Sunnï
hermeneutical heritage on their own terms. Since most of the Sunnï exegetical
tradition was not of the tafsïr bVl-ma°thür 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 Azharï Salafî historiographers, regardless whether the
exegete was or was not deserving of this term; Sunnï hermeneutical activities were
described by this rubric so as to present this tradition as always attempting to live up
to the rules of al-tafsïr bi'l-maJthür.n Al-Tabarï is a tafsïr bïl-ma^thur exegete only
if we understand the rubric ideologically and not factually, the term now modified to
both look mainstream Sunnï and pretend that Sunnism was always writing tafsïr in
this mode. In the introduction to his commentary, al-Tabarï 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 tafsïr has nothing to do with
the radical Sunnï position - and hence when we use the ambiguous term tafsïr
bVl-ma°thür we should be clear what we mean by it (it is best to disregard it as an
analytical term altogether). Indeed al-Tabarï included a chapter refuting the position of
those who claimed that only the Prophet can interpret the Qur'an.19 AM al-lisän, the
people of philology, were always the essential part of the Sunnï hermeneutical
paradigm.20
The radical hermeneutical program of the ahi al-hadlth, the one that was championed
by Ibn Taymiyya, and ridiculed by al-Qâdï above, would have certainly doomed the
Sunnï 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 Muctazilï intellectual challenge (a fact
already mentioned by Birkeland), and the second was the birth of Arabic philology.
The Muctazilï program was impossible to counter unless the Sunnï paradigm
answered its use of philology as the foundation of interpretation. Thus, it was not the
content of Muctazilï 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 Sunnï 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
Sunnï establishment was incapable of living up to this austere paradigm. The earliest
manifestations of hadlth-onented taf sir are to be found in the Sunnï hadlth collections.
The chapters on tafslr in these collections are the most prominent manifestation of
al-tafslr bVl-ma°thür paradigm - the real question is which tafsïr bïl-ma^hur we are
dealing with here. Is it the radical or the more mainstream? Take the book on tafslr
al-Qur3an in al-Bukhârï's Sahlh. This is the largest and most extensive book on tafslr
in any of the six collections - actually only two of the six contain independent books
on tafslr?2 For a hadlth scholar who lives and dies by the veracity of asänld, this is a
very peculiar section of his Sahlh; Speight has already noted the 'many puzzling
anomalies' in this part of the work.23 The book on tafslr in al-Bukhârï includes many
interpretations without isnäd, and these are not those of Muhammad, his Companions,
or his Followers! Sezgin has noted that al-Bukhârï had used the Majäz al-Qur°än
of Abu cUbayda,24 so it is clear that al-Bukhârï has no problems quoting material
that does not fit the radical paradigm. What was going on then here? If he was
uncomfortable with tafslr, he should have followed those who refused to give tafslr a
special place in their collections. This camp who refused to have a chapter on tafslr in
their hadlth collections might be thought of as reflecting the ultra-radical position: that
only Muhammad 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-Bukhârï and, ultimately, the traditional conservative Sunnï 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 tafslr meant the
opinions of Muhammad and primarily of his followers as guardians of his Sunna.
Taf sir presented in this format, the hadlth format, ceased to be a danger. To function
authoritatively tafsir has to be part of hadlth, 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 jämica, 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 hadlth 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 Abu cUbayda in this matrix is to
rob tafsir of an independent voice, it does not mean a succumbing to tafsir. To the
radicals it was not enough to have an isnäd to your interpretation, it has to be located
in hadlth 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. Tafsir 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 Bukhârï collection, tafsir as a rational
philological exercise was already present. There was no possibility to offer tafsir
without going beyond the Salaf. Yet the Salaf-oriented radical trend had its profound
and emotional appeal to ajamäc 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 tafsir, in an ideological fashion, is the Qur'an Commentary of Ibn Abi
Hätim (d. 327/938).25 I am here discounting the Qur'an commentaries of cAbd al-
Razzâq al-Sancanï, al-NasaDï, Ibn Mujähid, etc. These were actually part of the early
layer of tafsir, and they are as much tafsir bVl-ra3y as any other tafsir. They record the
opinions of individuals, mostly Qatäda and cIkrima, etc. and were also partly absorbed
into the mainstream Sunni 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-Tabarï and al-Thaclabï, they almost disappeared
from the horizon as independent units. Their elevation into the status of classics of the
tafsir bi'l-maJthür genre is the result of the Salati 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 AM Hätim. One can argue that his is a work that
was fully aware of the mainstream Sunnï 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 Sunnï 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 Sunnï 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 Sunnï hermeneutics. The fourth century AH
witnessed a plethora of works of taf sir, works which were aimed at re-establishing the
primacy of the Salaf in tafslr. 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 Abï Hätim
states that:27
A group of my brethren asked me to produce a Qur'an commentary,

a summarized commentary, with the soundest isnäds, 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 isnäds 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 isnäds, and then named those who agreed with them, omitting the
isnäds for these additional authorities. If they disagreed, I cited their
disagreement and gave an isnäd for each one of them, and named
those who agreed with them, omitting the isnäds. 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 tafslr, rather terse in an age of effusive
introductions, but also effective. This is to be a purged taf sir, 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. Tafsir will look like hadlth. The
lining up of interpretations in this commentary with their asänld is not unusual at least
in the first instance, but then also eerily un-Sunnï. Here the naming of the authorities
and their opinions might lead one to think that this is another al-Tabarï", which could
not be further from the case. Al-Taban was hardly neutral, weighing in, and bringing
in the likes of Abu cUbayda and al-FarräD, but also deciding which of the many
interpretations for a verse he favoured. Linguistic considerations were paramount for
al-Taban. He was also doing tafsir proper, with variant readings, verse division,
syntax analysis, etc. Here in Ibn Abï Hätim we have a hadlth methodology as the
mode of interpreting, where the isnäd is front and centre, but also the absence of non-
isnäd material is as significant. This is a world that is brought into existence through
the isnäd and not through a philological process.
There is an unexplained mystery in the medieval Islamic intellectual history: why

none of this type of tafsir works survived when there were so many of them. One can
understand the obliteration of the Muctazilï heritage, but even there the situation is not
as dire as in this supposedly staunchly Sunnï material - the core material. Ibn Abï
Hätim's tafsir 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
Abï Hätim's work, has also been lost.28 The tafsir of Abü'l-Shaykh (d. 369/979)
is also lost,29 as are all the tafäslr of Qiwäm al-Sunna (Ismacïl b. Muhammad,
d. 535/1140), despite the high standing this traditionalist scholar has enjoyed among
the ahi al-hadlth.30 Even the work of someone like Baqïy b. Makhlad (d. 276/889) did
not survive, although it was supposedly claimed to be better than that of al-Tabarï by
no one else but Ibn Hazm.31 That these exegetes each wrote a Qur'an commentary that
outdid al-Tabarï is a constant refrain among the conservative medieval appraisals.
Ibn Kathïr was unabashed in his praise for Ibn Abï Hätim stating that the work was
'copious and contained the entire body of transmitted material and ... surpasses the
commentary of al-Tabarï and all others'.32 We do know that these works were
available to Ibn Taymiyya, they were available to Ibn Kathïr, and al-Suyûtï 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-Suyûtï and then lost afterward because they were already worn out copies and there
was no interest in copying them.
Ibn Abï Hätim, Ibn Mardawayh and Abü'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 Kathïr and then
al-Suyûtï, and then the Wahhabïs, 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 taf sir 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 (sarf).34 He lists many authors, singling out Ibn Abï Hätim,
Baqïy b. Makhlad and Ibn Mardawayh as worthy of praise - he does also include Ibn
Jarïr al-Tabari.35
By then the presence of these authors in the mainstream SunnI hermeneutical corpus
was non existent and they hardly, if ever, figure in any of the tafslr works of
the establishment. Ibn Kathlr, writing in the eighth/fourteenth century, was the first
to reposition al-Tabari, Ibn Abï Hätim 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-Tabari and marrying him off to Ibn Abï Hätim and Ibn Mardawayh.36 Ibn Kathïr
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 (lïl-muttaqïn), especially the word
'godfearing'. Here he does what is expected, quoting al-Tabari and Ibn Abï Hätim and
if, we are to accept the manuscript al-Azhar Tafsir 168 as his first edition of the work,
that is all that he does here.37 The standard edition of his tafslr however, which
follows a latter recension of the work, shows clearly that Ibn Kathïr also drew into his
orbit the usual standard classical works of tafslr (al-Zamakhsahrï, al-Qurtubï and
al-Razï), in this instance al-Qurtubï (who was also quoting al-Thaclabï).38 The issue of
contamination is thus paramount in Ibn Kathïr. Far more important is that Ibn Kathïr
was all but forgotten, until discovered and reintroduced in the nineteenth century.39 As
such, even the incorporation of the Ibn Abï Hätim and Ibn Mardawayh material in an
encyclopaedic tafslr work was useless for the time being since Ibn Kathïr was not
instrumental in the history of medieval tafslr.
Yet, the ascendency of this trend of tafslr depended on later developments. We have
to wait for al-Suyütfs massive work al-Durr al-manthür.40 Here the reorientation is
radical in ways that transforms tafslr into a fully new art. If there is a tafslr where
isnäd and hadlth orientation is fully central it is here. Suddenly the whole corpus of
hadlth literature, not only Ibn Abï Hätim and Ibn Mardawyah, is the fodder for tafslr.
Ironically, having reached this summit al-tafslr bi'l-maJthür has reached its limit.
It could go no further. Rediscovering these works and repositioning them as central in
the tradition of tafslr was made possible by the massive effort of republication that
was carried out by the Salati movement. The history of publication of tafslr 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 taf sir is also a history of the book in the Arab and Islamic World.
Shïcï Developments
What has been so far discussed regarding the history of taf sir is the Sunnï side of the
story. Shïcï hermeneutical developments were however quite similar to this outline. A
radical insistence on the authority of the Imam was the hallmark of the pre-Buwayhid
period. Luckily, Meir Bar-Asher has already studied this early radical phase of Shïcï
tafslr in detail, so we need not go into it here.41 What needs to be added is that this
radicalism, according to which the Imam gave authoritative interpretation of the
meaning of the Qur'an, invariably a partisan interpretation that reaffirmed the validity
of Shïcism and its worldview, was also welded to a believe that the cUthmânï codex of
the Qur'an was also incomplete and falsified by the Sunnïs. This was too radical a
position for scholastic Shïcism, which in its classical phase saw to it that this position
was dropped and Shïcï Qur'an interpretation was aligned with Sunnï and Muctazilï
practices. Figures like Abu Jacfar al-Tûsï (d. 460/1067) and al-Fadl b. al-Hasan
al-Tabrisï (d. 548/1153) read mostly like any Sunnï mainstream exegete, with a
sprinkling of Shïcï leanings. What is interesting is that the early layer would witness a
violent return with the Safavid revival of Shïcï scholarship. This radical Shïcï trend,
like its counterpart in Sunnism, is a latent radical layer that periodically resurfaces and
complicates the hermeneutical structure of Shïcism. Once more, we are well informed
of this trend thanks to the work of Todd Lawson.42
A History of the Term al-tafsïr biyl-ma3thür
It is evident that a clarification of the history of the term al-tafslr bVl-ma3ihür has
direct implications on our ability to carry a proper investigation of the history of tafslr.
First, there is no evidence of the use of this term as an analytical term in the
indigenous scholarship on the nature of tafslr before 1940. What we find is al-tafslr
bVl-cilm, but never al-tafslr bïl-ma^thur. This does not mean that there were no terms
to refer to material that was tradition-based, we do have a classification of tafslr as
musnad al-tafslr, a term first used by al-Wâhidï in the introduction to his al-Wasït.43
This term has a clearly puritanical ring to it. What it stood for was always on the
periphery. Whatever this approach to tafslr was, it was a second rate approach in the
medieval scholastic world.
I have shown earlier that there was a radical fringe in tafslr history, which one could
call al-tafslr bïl-maJthur, the Ibn Abï Hätim 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 Muctazilï
theologians made fun of the 'triad' approach to tafslr, but also the grand figures of
the Sunnï establishment were ruthless in their ridicule of this trend. Al-Ghazâlï
(d. 505/1 111) was withering in his attack on people who would think that the meaning
of the Qur'an is privileged to Ibn cAbbäs and Mujâhid and their likes only.45
Al-Ghazâlï 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 tafslr in his Muqaddima fì usui al-tafsïr, a foundational
text for the hadïth-onenied tafsïr.46 He, however, did not use any technical term for it
though, just a classification of the sources: tafsïr came from the Prophet, Companions
and their Successors. Not satisfied with defending one form of tafsïr, he went a
step further and dismissed many of the tafsïr works that were then popular, and
championed unknown and obscure works to the then seminary curriculum.
Ibn Kathïr, 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 Kathïr was actually more radical than its final version in
which the mainstream of tafsïr is readmitted. Ibn Kathïr's work is a reworking of
al-Tabarï 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 Baydâwï-Zamakhsharï paradigm. One has to admire the resolve of Ibn
Kathïr (and his tribulations) since he was writing his commentary in the century that
was the apex of the häshiya as the mode of writing tafsïr in the madrasa.
The real turning point in this story was the work of al-Suyûtï. The title of al-Suyûtï's
commentary, al-Durr al-manthür fi'l-tafsïr bïl-ma3thur, can be seen as the defining
moment of the birth of the term, but also of the formulation of the tafsïr as a takhrïj
work - the place where individual atomised interpretative units are collated from the
hadïth literature - tafsïr now is just collation of already existing narrated material.
The very language of introducing an interpretive phrase was borrowed from the most
characteristic of hadïth works, wa-akhraja ('it has been narrated in an authoritative
work of hadïth'). When al-Suyûtï wrote this commentary, it was part of a triad of
works on tafsïr. First there was his Tafsïr al-Jalälayn, a continuation of the work of
his teacher Jalâl al-Mahallï. There was his häshiya on al-Baydâwï, a work that is now
all but forgotten. The one which proved most influential was his al-Durr al-manthür.
The next stage in the history of the term came with the composition of al-Shawkânï's
Qur'an commentary Fath al-qadïr, with the subtitle al-Jämic baynfannay al-riyäwa
wa'1-diräya min cilm al-tafsir ('The Conciliator in the Two Arts of tafsïr, That of
Tradition, riwäya, and That of Rational Reasoning, diräycC). 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 tafsir through
traditions (riwäya), and on the other those who do it through philology (diräya).
Al-Shawkânï presents himself as the grand conciliator of these two camps of the
tradition. It is clear that al-Shawkânï was aware of Ibn Kathïr's and al-Suyütf s works,
placing them at the centre of the tradition, insofar as they represent one of the radical
sides of tafsir. He was also very aware of the significance of al-Suyütf s al-Durr
al-manthür, rightly assessing it as the pinnacle in this art of composition, but also the
work that saved us this material from oblivion. Al-Shawkânï 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 tafsir. What was peripheral is moving and edging closer to the
centre. We have now major figures of the seminary system writing works on tafsir that
gave preponderance of weight to the method of hadlth in tafsir. More importantly,
tafsir by hadlth method has now a definite term to go by (at least in titles of works).
Indeed we have two: tafsir bïl-ma°thur and tafsir bïl-riwaya.
The story then moves to nineteenth-century India, where a Muslim scholar and
disciple of the teachings of Wahhäbism, Muhammad Siddïq Hasan Khan (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, Fath al-bayänfi
maqäsid al-Qur3än, was the earliest of the hadlth-onented tafäslr to be published.
This tafsir was published, before the works of Ibn Kathïr, al-Suyûtï or al-Shawkânï, 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 Kathïr, al-Suyûtï and
al-Shawkânï. Such was the intimate connection between this work and Ibn Kathïr's
that the first print of Ibn Kathïr's work was on the margins of the Fath al-bayän when
it was reissued in Cairo in 1294/1877.47
Al-Shawkânï's tafsir 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 hadlth-based tafsir.48 Al-Durr al-manthür 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-Taban's
Qur'an commentary was published in 1905, we have all the major works of tafsir that
were hadlth-based (in the case of al-Tabarï this was more the result of a confusion due
to the presence of full asänld in his work and not because the work was indeed hadlth-
based) published in print. The miserly treatment of Ibn Kathïr'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 Büläq 1302/1884 edition of
his taf sir came out. The centrality of Ibn Kathïr's work was made manifest when a
nine-volume edition came out in 1924, printed by Rashïd Rida and with money from
the newly powerful Saudi king cAbd al-cAzïz Äl Sacüd.51 This edition was also
physically very different in format from the usual taf sir works hitherto fashionable in
the Islamic world. The format was basically modern, a move away from the standard
Büläq crowded-page format, and this was luxuriously printed. The page was divided
in two, with an upper part for Ibn Kathïr's Qur'an commentary and the bottom part for
al-Baghawf s Macälim al-tanzll. It was no secret that Ibn Taymiyya thought highly
of the editorial work of al-Baghawï, Macälim al-tanzll being a clean up job of
al-Thaclabfs al-Kashf wa'1-bayän. By giving taf sir works the same format as other
important works the Salati movement was moving tafslr into the centre of their
cultural activities. Soon the new reprint of al-Räzf s work would be issued in the same
format and not in the old Büläq format of the nineteenth century (I am referring to the
thirty-two-volume edition of al-Räzf s work which started to appear in 1933).
The presence of this massive amount of tafslr literature championing one version of
tafslr 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 tafslr! 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 Azhari Amin al-Khüli on Tafslr' in the Arabic version of
the Encyclopaedia of Islam, DäJirat al-macärif al-Islämiyya, in 1933 (as discussed
above). This was a long article, radically departing from the norms of the time and
calling for a reorientation of tafslr. Its disdain for the usual way of doing tasflr 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 fi usui al-tafsir. 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 Salali, 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-taf sir
bi'l-maJthür as an analytical term began. AI-Aznar, having decided to renovate its
programs, asked one of its members to write a textbook for culüm al-QurDän. The first
edition of this textbook, Manähil al-cirfanfl culüm al-QurJän by Muhammad cAbd
al-cAzïm al-Zurqäni, 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-tafsir bïl-ma°thur as an analytical
term. In his discussion on the divisions of tafslr, al-Zurqanï cites unnamed sources
that have divided tafslr into three categories: tafslr bi'l-riwäya also called al-taf sir
bVl-ma3thür\ al-tafsïr bVl-diräya also known as al-tafsïr bVl-ra°y\ and lastly tafsir
bïl-ishàraP 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 (riwäya
or ma'thür). The heading of the chapters however leaves no doubt that al-tafsïr
bi'l-ma3thür 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-tafsïr bi'l-maJthür have to thus be
aware that its origin as an analytical descriptive term lies in an Azharï text book, in
which the term is used, however, to argue for a proto-Salafí position. When we use it
to describe the tradition we, no matter how cautious we are, are actually lending
authority to the Salati paradigm of how to understand the history of tafsir.
The publication of the first incomplete translation of Ignaz Goldziher by cAlï Hasan
c
Abd al-Qädir in 1944 which used the term al-tafsïr bi'l-maJthür 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 Amin al-
KhOlï's article on tafsir, 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 Azharîs. Noting and explaining this failure, CAH cAbd
al-Qädir, took it upon himself to fill the gap in this regard. Incidentally, the full
translation of Goldziher's work on tafsir was undertaken by cAbd al-Halfm al-Najjär
in 1954 (hence the fall into disuse of cAbd al-Qädir's early partial translation).
By the time Muhammad al-Dhahabï published what was to become the standard
history in the field, al-Tafsïr wa'1-mufassirün (sometime soon after 1946, the year the
dissertation that forms the basis of the work was defended), the term al-tafsïr
bVl-ma°thür has become the central analytical term in defining tafsïr. Al-Dhahabï
treats the term as if it is the only analytical paradigm that can be mustered to judge
tafsïr and its history. Indeed al-Dhahabfs work is a reworking of Manähil al-cirfän
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 tafsïr.
Al-Dhahabfs history is thus a turning point in the history of tafsïr historiography.

By acting as the resolution site for different Salari articulations it solidified the Salafï
grip on tafsïr 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) tafsïr
author Baqï b. Makhlad is praised. This author makes an appearance all of a sudden in
Manähil al-cirfän of al-Zurqânï,58 in which he is grouped by al-Zurqânï with
al-Tabarï, Abü'1-Layth al-Samarqandï (d. 373/983), al-Suyüti, Ibn Kathïr, al-Baghawï,

al-Wähidi (as the author of Asbäb al-nuzül, a rather /snäd-conservative work of taf sir)
and finally a work by Abu Jacfar al-Nahhäs on abrogation.59 All these authors by then
have been published in Cairo, and all were becoming major figures in the genre of
tafsïr.60 To group Baqï 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 tafsïr will be mentioned
consistently by the Salati historians.
The last major development in the use of the term al-tafsïr bïl-ma^hur came with its
movement to English-language tafsïr 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 tafsïr. The term is now
fully entrenched on the two sides of the historiography of tafsïr, 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 tafsïr, 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 tafsïr 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 tafsïr 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 tafsïr is far more intimately tied to philology than is the case if we insist on
using the term al-tafsïr bi'l-maJthür as an intrinsic lens to assess the history of the
genre by it. Whatever tafsïr by riwäya 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 Kharijïs 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-tafsïr bVl-ma°thür in the history of tafsïr thus has
much to do with the fact that it is used to refer to two radical phases in the history of
Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of tafsïr in Arabic 37
the genre that were conflated and collapsed into one. The early resistance to tafsïr
bïl-ra°y created the presumption that mainstream Sunnï tafsïr was the opposite,
something like al-tafsïr bi'l-ma^hür, which was not the case. Mainstream Sunnï
hermeneutics refused this radical understanding of tafsïr, 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 Sunnï tradition as one
that was and ought to have been something like al-tafsïr bVl-ma3thür. This
historiographie reconfiguring of tafsïr 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 Muhammad al-Dhahabï, al-Tafsïr wa'1-mufassirün, 4th edn (Cairo: Matbacat Wahba, 1989).
2 Reprinted in his al-Acmäl al-kämila (10 vols, Cairo: al-Hay°a al-Misriyya al-cÄma li'1-Kitäb,
1995).
3 Ibrahim Rufayda, al-Nahw wa-kutub al-tafsïr (2 vols, Binghâzï: n.p., 1982).
4 Al-Fädil b. cÄshür, al-Tafsïr wa-rijäluhu (Tunis: Dar al-Kutub al-Sharqiyya, 1966).
5 Al-Fihris al-shämil IVl-turäth al-'Arabi al-Islàmï al-makhtüt, culüm al-QurJän: makhtütät
al-tafsïr (12 vols, Amman: Mu°assasat Äl al-Bayt, 1987).
6 On this introduction see my Tbn 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 thefirstprinting of al-Taban's Qur'an commentary was the direct
result of assistance from the prince of Najd of the Ä1 al-Rashïd.
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 Tafsïr Tradition: The Qur°än Commentary of al-Thaclabï
(D. 427/1035) (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
10 See my Formation of the Classical Tafsïr Tradition, pp. 14-16.
11 See Amïn al-Khûlï, al-Tafsïr, p. 216.
12 Isaiah Goldfeld called these type of tafsïr works 'collective commentaries'. See his
The Development of Theory on QurDänic 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-Qädi, cAbd al-Jabbär, al-Mughnï fi abwäb al-tawhld wa'l-cadl: icjäz al-Qur7än, ed.
Amin al-Khüli (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub, 1960), vol. 16, pp. 345-6. It is an irony of fate that
al-Khüli was the editor of this volume: the editing of Muctazilï texts became the subversive act
of the defeated.
16 Al-Shawkânï, Fath al-Qadlr (6 vols, Beirut: Dar Ibn Kathïr, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 13-16.
17 Note the exquisite remark made by cÄmir b. cAlï al-c Arabi in his introduction to his edition
of al-Iklïl fi istinbät al-tanzïl (3 vols, Jeddah: Dar al-Andalus al-Khadrä0, 2002), vol. 1, p. 179,
c
η. 2, while discussing the Qur'an commentary of Ibn Atiyya: 'Dr al-Dhahabï counted this book
as one of the commentaries in the style of al-tafslr bVl-ma "thür, I thought the same, basing my
opinion on his judgement, only to realise that it is actually a commentary of the style of al-tafslr
bïl-raJy\ The 'Dr al-Dhahabf he is referring to is no one else but our man, the historian of the
field. Al-CArabi was correct in detecting the contradictions in the use of this term. To the
hardcore Salati ideologues, al-tafslr bïl-ma'thûr should be al-tafslr bVl-riwäya, understood to
be transmission from the Salaf early three generations only. The muddle was unacceptable.
18 Al-Tabari, Jämic al-bayän Lan ta'wll äy al-Qur'än (30 vols, Cairo: Mustafa al-Bäbi
al-Halabi, 1968), vol. 1, p. 33.
19 Al-Tabari, Jämic al-bayän, vol. 1, pp. 34-5.
20 Al-Tabari, Jämic al-bayän, vol. 1, p. 41.
21 For internal Islamic polemics over the status of grammar and philology, see al-Tüfí,
al-Sacqa al-ghadabiyya fi'l-radd calä munkirl al-cArabiyya, ed. Muhammad Fädil (Riyadh:
Maktabat al-cUbaykän, 1997).
22 For a detailed discussion of the 'books of tafslr' in the hadlth collections see the
introduction in Sabri al-Shâficï and Sayyid al-Jalïmï (eds), Tafslr al-Nasä°l (2 vols, Beirut:
Mu3assasat al-Kutub al-Thaqäfiyya, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 103-8.
23 See R. Marston Speight, 'The Function of hadith as Commentary on the Qur'än, as Seen in
the Six Authoritative Collections' in Andrew Rippin (ed.), Approaches to the History of the
Interpretation of the Qur'än (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 74.
24 Speight, 'The Function of hadith', p. 74.
25 For Ibn Abi Hätim al-Räzi, see Eerik Dickinson, The Development of Early Sunnite
Hadlth Criticism: The Taqdima of Ibn Abi Hätim al-Räzl (240/854-327/938), (Leiden: Brill,
2001).
26 Ibn Abi Hätim 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 Hadlth
Criticism, p. 37 with some modifications. See the original in Ibn Abi Hätim, Tafslr Ibn Abl
Hätim, ed. Ahmad al-Zahräni (2 vols, Medina: Maktabat al-Där, 1987), vol. 1, p. 9.
28 On Ibn Mardawayh see Saleh, Formation, p. 3n., p. 210, p. 217n., p. 226.
29 On Abü'1-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 Akhläq al-nabl wa-ädäbihi,
ed. Sälih al-Waniyän (4 vols, Riyadh: Dar al-Muslim, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 7-44; see also the
introduction to the edition of his work Kitäb al-cazama, ed. Rida Allah al-Mubärkfuri (5 vols,
Riyadh: Dar al-cÄsima, 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-sälihln, ed. Karam b. Ahmad (4 vols, Riyadh: Dar al-Räya, 1999), vol. 1,
pp. 1-242.
31 On Baqiy 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 Hadlth Criticism, p. 36.
For the text of the Arabic see Ibn Kathïr, al-Bidäya wa'l-nihäya, ed. cAbd Allah al-Turkï
(Cairo: DärHajr, 1998), vol. 15, p. 113; 'wa-lahu al-tafslr al-häfil alladhl ishtamala calä'l-naql
al-kämil alladhl y urbi flhi calä taf sir Ibn Jarlr wa-ghayrihi min al-mufassirln\
33 On Ibn Taymiyya's attempt to reposition these authors as the central figures in taf sir, see
note 6.
34 Ibn Taymiyya, Muqaddima fi usui al-tafslr, ed. cAdnän al-Zarzür (Kuwait: Dar al-Qur°än
al-Karim, 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 Dar al-Shacb edition of Ibn Kathïr's Taf sir, in which a history of
the work is outlined: Ibn Kathïr, Tafsir al-Qur3ân al-cazlm, ed. cAbd al-cAzïz Ghunaym et al.
(Cairo: al-Shacb, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 3-10.
37 The issue of the history of the composition of Ibn Kathïr'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 Tafsïr 168 MS, which lacks the citations from
other Qur'an commentaries beside that of al-Taban or Ibn Abï Hätim. 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 Dar al-Shacb edition, see Ibn Kathïr, Tafsir al-QurDän al-cazlm, ed.
c
Abd al-cAzïz Ghunaym et al. (Cairo: al-Shacab, 1971), p. 62.
38 For the standard versions of Ibn Kathïr's commentary, see Tafsir al-Qur^än al-cazlm
(4 vols, Cairo: n.p, n.d., reprinted Beirut: Dar al-Macrifa, 1980), vol. 1, p. 40; see also the now
'critical' edition, Muhammad Mustafa al-Sayyid et al. (eds), Tafsir al-Qur1 an al-cazlm (15 vols,
Cairo: MuDassasat Qurtuba, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 262-3. For the citation from al-Qurtubï, compare
with al-Jämic li-ahkäm al-Qur3an, 3rd edn (20 vols, Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya, 1967),
vol. 1, pp. 160-2. For al-Qurtubï's citations from al-Thaclabï, see al-Kashf wa'l-bayän can
tafsir al-Qur1 an, ed. Abu Muhammad b. cÄshür (cAlï cÄshür) (10 vols, Beirut: Dar Ihyä°
al-Turäth al-cArabi, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 142-3.
39 Ismâcïl cAbd al-cÄl, Ibn Kathlr wa-manhajuhu fì'1-tafslr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Malik Faysal,
1984), pp. 451-2.
40 Cf. the same aya, Q. 2:2, in al-Suyûtï, al-Durr al-manthür, ed. cAbd Allah b. cAbd
al-Muhsin al-Turkï (25 vols, Cairo: Markaz Hajr, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 130-7.
41 Meir M. Bar-Asher, Scripture and Exegesis in Early Imäml ShVism (Leiden: Brill, 1999);
see also now Etan Kholberg and Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi (eds), Revelation and
Falsification: The Kitäb al-qira'ät of Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Sayyärl, 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 cÄdil cAbd al-Mawjüd et al., al-Waslt (4 vols, Beirut: Dar al-Kutub
al-cIlmiyya, 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
Tafsïr: al-Wâhidï (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-Qâdï cAbd al-Jabbär to the triad theory can be read in his al-Mughnl,
vol. 16 (Ifäz al-Qur1 an), pp. 361-2. The title of his refutation reads: Ά Chapter on the Fact
that Knowing the Intentions and Meanings of God in the Qur'an is not a Privilege that is
Preserved for Muhammad or the Salaf (fasi fi anna muräd Allah bi'l-Qur'än lä yakhtass
bi-macrifat al-rasül wa-lä al-salaf)\
45 See Kristin Zahra Sands, Sufi Commentaries on the Qur'än in Classical Islam (London:
Routledge, 2006), p. 33. For the Arabic text, see al-Ghazalï, Ihyälculüm al-dïn (Cairo: Matbaca
al-cUthmäniyya, 1933), vol. 1, p. 256, lines 8-10: 'an yakün qad qar3 tafslran lähiran
wa-ictaqada annahu lä maLnä li-kalimät al-Qur'än illä mä tanäwalahu al-naql can Ibn cAbbäs
wa-Mujähid wa-ghayrihimä anna mä warn1 dhälik taf sir bi'l-raJy\ For al-Ghazälfs defence of
the freedom of the exegete, see Sands, Sufi Commentaries, pp. 47-50.
46 See my 'Ibn Taymiyya and the Rise of Radical Hermeneutics'.
47 Muhammad Siddïq Hasan Khan, Fatti al-bayän fi maqäsid al-Qur7än (10 vols, Cairo:
Büläq, 1294/1877), reissued by the Büläq press in 1302, also published in Iran in 1294
in 4 vols.
48 Al-Shawkânï, Tafsir (Cairo: Matbacat al-Bâbï al-Halabï, 1349/1930).
49 Al-Suyüti, al-Durr al-manthür (Cairo: al-Matbaca al-Maymaniyya, 1314/1896). The editor
was Muhammad al-Zahri al-Ghamrawï, who was then called musahhih. All editions of al-Durr
go back to this edition and its editor, an Azharï 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 shark on al-Nawawfs al-Minhäj called al-Siräj al-wahhäj
(Cairo: Mustafa al-Bâbï al-Halabï, 1352/1933), the colophon of which mentions that it was
finished in 1337/1918.
50 Reprinted in Beirut by Dar al-Macrifa (see the 1980 edition for example).
51 Dar al-Manär.
52 The earliest publication date for this work I have been able to find is 1359/1940, for an
edition published by Matbacat Shabra in Cairo. There were also editions published by Dar Ihyä3
al-Kutub al-c Arabiyya (cïsâ al-Bâbï al-Halabï), the third edition of which is the one available in
research libraries. Since the author Muhammad cAbd al-cAzïm al-Zurqânï quoted from the
Muqaddima of Ibn Taymiyya it is clear that the first al-Bâbï edition could not have come out
before 1936, the year of the publication of Ibn Taymiyya's Muqaddima; for quotations from the
Muqaddima in Manähil, see vol. 1, p. 492 and p. 496 of the edition cited in note 34.
53 Al-Zurqânï, Manähil al-'irfanfi Lulüm al-QurJän (Cairo: Dar Ihyä3 al-Kutub al-cArabiyya,
n.d., probably 1953), vol. 1, p. 479; for the heading with al-tafslr bVl-ma^hür, see vol. 1,
p. 480.
54 Al-Zurqânï, Manähil al-cirfän, vol. 1, pp. 491-512. The textbook is attempting the
impossible: keeping both the old Ashcari understanding of taf sir and the Ibn Taymiyya
paradigm. The coexistence of the two is jarring, and ultimately the more Salati approach gets
the better share.
55 cAlï Hasan cAbd al-Qädir, al-Madhähib al-Islämiyya fi taf sir al-Qur'än, Ajnats Jüld Tisïhr,
tr. cAlï Hasan cAbd al-Qädir (Cairo: Matbacat al-cUlüm, 1363/1944), p. hä\ p. 51.
56 cAbd al-Qädir, al-Madhähib al-Islämiyya, p. alif
57 See Ibn Taymiyya, Muqaddima (Damascus: Matbacat al-Tarraqï, 1936), p. 34. The reprint
by al-Matbaca al-Salafiyya, Cairo (1950 print), actually supplies afatwä by Ibn Taymiyya on
the most sound of Qur'an commentaries, see this edition, pp. 56-8.
58 Al-Zurqânï, Manähil, vol. 1, pp. 498-9.
59 Al-Zurqânï, Manähil, vol. 1, pp. 498-9.
60 Al-Nahhäs's work on abrogation, Kitäb al-näsikh wa'l-mansükh was published in Cairo in
1905.
^ s
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Saleh Historiography of Tafsir

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Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of

tafslr in Arabic: A History of the

Histories of tafslr in the Arab World

Journal of Qur'anic Studies 12 (2010): 6-40

wa'1-mufassirün,1 (ii) the al-Tafslr: macälim hayätihi - manhajuhu al-yawm of

(al-Miqdâd al-Suyüri, d. 826/1423) and Zaydï (Yüsuf b. Ahmad al-Yamânï al-Zaydi,

Al-Dhababf 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 Ashcari Traditional Camp

Theoretical Considerations Based on the Historiography of tafslr in the

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

The third type of tafsir work is the häshiya-style commentary. These

al-tawhïd wa'l-cadl. It offers a truncated, albeit accurate, account of the hermeneutical

Know that the opponents from amongst the nonbelievers, while

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

When the Sunnï 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-tafsïr biyl-ma3thür

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

Tradition, riwäya, and That of Rational Reasoning, diräycC). The introduction is

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

Al-Dhahabfs history is thus a turning point in the history of tafsïr historiography.

al-Tabarï, Abü'1-Layth al-Samarqandï (d. 373/983), al-Suyüti, Ibn Kathïr, al-Baghawï,

The ATLA Serials (ATLAS®) collection contains electronic versions of previously

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