The Quranic interpretive tradition, tafsīr, is one of the most voluminous of Islamic literary genres, second only to the legal tradition. All generations of Muslims in nearly every Islamic land have consistently produced Quranic commentaries that reflect their outlook on fundamental issues confronting Muslim societies, making this genre a continuous record of what Muslims of different lands and different ages have thought on various topics. Yet it is also the most unpredictable of genres: unlike other Islamic sciences, which systematized their methodological underpinnings, the Quranic commentary tradition never established unanimous rules for how to interpret the Quran. There was more than one hermeneutical theory in medieval Islam. Indeed, most commentators availed themselves of more than one method in the same work. Competition invariably led to extensive exchange among theological camps and schools. Nonetheless, in the classical period, the tafsīr tradition displayed far more unity than in the modern period. Many modern exegetes have abandoned the dictates and methodologies of the classical tradition, interpreting the Quran according to ideological stances that reduce the subtleties of the revelation to the predilections of human beings in the present world.
Most of the Western scholarly studies available today are devoted to the earliest phase of the Quranic exegetical tradition, the pre-Ṭabarī (Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, d. 310/923) phase. There are noticeably fewer studies on classical exegesis, or post-Ṭabarī literature.1 There are several reasons for this state of affairs. Perhaps the first is the sheer volume of the material at hand; many of the classical commentaries—whether published or in manuscript form—run to thousands of pages or folios. This vast literature presents us with methodological problems about how to approach and study it. Indeed, tafsīr studies still lack the basic tools that would allow scholars the possibility of assessing the parameters of the field. We have neither a complete inventory of tafsīr works,2 nor, apart from a few monograph studies on some famous exegetes,3 detailed studies of individual authors or works. As a result, we have thus far been unable to develop an accurate outline of the historical development of tafsīr.
The second reason that has so far stood in the way of a systematic approach to the field is that the scholarly investigation of classical tafsīr has been on the whole constrained by what is available in print. The titles that remain confined to manuscript form are so numerous that any notion that what already exists in print is sufficiently representative to enable us to draw a picture of the genre should be forsaken. There are bound to be significant and seminal works of tafsīr that are still untouched, works whose assessment would not only fill gaps in our knowledge of the history of this genre, but are also likely to modify what we think of the cultural significance of tafsīr.
Let me give a stark example of this situation. Recently the Quranic commentary of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944), the founder of the Māturīdī Sunni school of theology, has been published in ten volumes.4 Although the work has been discussed before in an article by Manfred Götz and was the subject of a doctoral dissertation by Muhammad Rahman, which was published in English, scholars continue to discuss the history of tafsīr as if this work did not exist.5 One cursory glance at this work is sufficient to make us realize that, when fully investigated, it will radically change the way we perceive the development of early Quranic commentaries.6 Al-Māturīdī—“the famous unknown,” as Ulrich Rudolph describes him—was a contemporary of al-Ṭabarī, and they both represent different hermeneutical traditions. He is as significant a witness to the history of early tafsīr as al-Ṭabarī. Thus even the early period, the most studied part of tafsīr history, is, because of modern Western academia’s haphazard method of studying tafsīr, insufficiently investigated, and much of what we have said to characterize it needs reevaluation.
The accounts of the tradition that have been written by modern Muslim scholars of tafsīr, despite all their drawbacks—guided as they are by a prescriptive analysis of the tradition—are currently the most exhaustive that we have.7 Unfortunately, the long history of this genre, spanning fourteen centuries, means that the Muslim scholarly tradition has gone through many phases of internal reassessment along with what inevitably accompanies such a process: on the one hand, periodic downgrading of the significance of once very influential works and in some cases even the disowning of them and, on the other, the resurrection of marginal works that were never previously considered to be of substance. Thus the Quranic commentary of Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Thaʿlabī (d. 427/1035), once an influential work, is now deemed worthless among Sunni scholars and unfit for publication;8 it was published for the first time only recently through the efforts of Shiite scholars.9 Meanwhile, an author like Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 327/938), a rather minor figure in the history of the field, was resuscitated and given new significance through the efforts of modern Salafī scholars who were influenced by the positive assessment of the merit of his work by Aḥmad ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328).10 We cannot therefore rely solely on histories by partisans of the tradition to point us toward whom and what to research.
To give another example of how different elements work to impede the scholarly process of assessing this literature, one can cite the case of super-glosses, or what is known in Arabic as ḥawāshī. Like much of the scholastic tradition in Islam, the tafsīr tradition had an active subgenre of super-commentaries that were written primarily on two Quranic commentaries used in the teaching of tafsīr, the al-Kashshāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl (The Unveiler of the Truths of Revelation) of Maḥmūd ibn ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144) and the Anwār al-tanzīl (The Lights of Revelation) of ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar al-Bayḍāwī (d. 685/1286), and to a lesser extent on a third commentary, Tafsīr al-Jalālayn (Commentary of the Two Jalāl al-Dīns), by Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) and his teacher, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Maḥallī (d. 864/1459). In the thirteenth/nineteenth and early fourteenth/twentieth centuries, before the Romantic notions of a medieval Islamic decline and decadence penetrated the traditional Muslim establishments, publishing houses in the Islamic world (including Istanbul, the center of Ottoman seminary education) were busy issuing many of the voluminous “medieval” glosses on tafsīr works. They were an essential part of the madrasah curriculum and were considered part and parcel of the exegetical tradition, not medieval corruptions of a once classical tradition. As a matter of fact, al-Kashshāf of al-Zamakhsharī and Anwār al-tanzīl of al-Bayḍāwī were usually printed with their glosses or refutations.
Publishing of new glosses has all but stopped, a regrettable development, but unless we have access to this subgenre of tafsīr, which became the dominant form of writing exegetical works after the seventh century AH, we shall remain severely hampered in our efforts to write any meaningful history of the genre.11 If we add to this the fact that almost no scholarly interest has ever been shown in glosses by modern academics, we have a predicament in the field that will be hard to get rid of: the glosses are not being published (out of sight) and scholars are not interested in studying them (out of mind).12
Yet perhaps the main reason so little attention is given to the classical period of exegesis, in contrast to the early period, is epistemological. Historical scholarship on origins is thought to hold for us the promise of offering the most important explanation of the process of development. A study of the early period of the tradition has the added presumed value that one is studying the creative period of the tradition, in contradistinction to the classical period, which is assumed by modern scholars to be both transparent—the material is not lost, as the early material is—and redundant, because tafsīr in the classical period consists of nothing but recopying and recycling the early material. Unless we abandon epistemological obsessions with origins and Romantic notions of what constitutes originality, the study of classical tafsīr will unfortunately remain marginal. Such biases lead us to neglect some of the most fascinating and original works produced in Islamic civilization, works that were crucial to forming the intellectual outlook of the traditional educated elite.
A corollary of our not taking the post-Ṭabarī period of exegesis seriously is that we have also treated classical tafsīr works first and foremost as sources of information about matters that were not the primary focus of these works. Classical tafsīr works, when consulted by modern scholars, are usually used to shed light on fields of inquiry that are not concerned with hermeneutics. Tafsīr studies must refocus on hermeneutical issues and cease to consider these works as ancillary sources not worthy of attention on their own. Since the primary purpose of these works was exegetical, our primary scholarly preoccupation has been to reflect that reality. Tafsīr studies have not as yet experienced the turn to hermeneutics that Jewish midrash studies have experienced since the 1980s.
The remainder of this essay discusses the methods used by classical commentators, offers a classification of the works produced, and attempts to explore the function and aim of tafsīr. Moreover, it highlights some commentators not usually discussed before, if only to show the richness of this tradition.
Writing at the end of the fourth/tenth century, the Muʿtazilite theologian and judge (qāḍī) ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 415/1025) gave a sketch of the existing methods of Quranic interpretation.13 He spoke of those who claimed that the Quran should not be interpreted, but merely believed in and recited, those who maintained that it has a meaning, but that it was impossible to establish what that meaning was; and those who insisted that either only the Prophet or only the first three generations of Muslims could interpret the meaning of the Quran. A different camp insisted that the Quran has an inner meaning, a bāṭin, distinct from its surface meaning, but opinions varied about who could know that inner meaning; some said scholars, some thought the Prophet, and some said also the Shiite Imams. Others denied the existence of an inner layer of meaning and believed that only the Imam could know the outer meaning of the Quran.
The list given by ʿAbd al-Jabbār is instructive not because it is an objective description of the reality in his time, but because it represents the first systematic attempt to distinguish the different hermeneutical methods of early Islam. He sets forth the different methods in order to substantiate his claim that they are incoherent and that the only logical and defensible hermeneutical method to use is the philological one. ʿAbd al-Jabbār would like us to think that the Muʿtazilites were the only advocates of philology, which was of course not the case.
Broadly speaking, the methods listed by ʿAbd al-Jabbār reflected the methods adopted by some camps—the radical fringe camps, whether Sunni or Shiite—whose positions were never dominant in the classical, or post-Ṭabarī, period. These radical positions on how to approach the Quran would, however, be retained, but only as part of other methods. They would never be allowed supremacy in the manner that ʿAbd al-Jabbār described. Nevertheless they remained available options and would every so often erupt on the scene as if from nowhere and attempt to claim the sole authority to interpret the Quran.
Two distinct issues were raised by ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s list. Can one interpret the Quran, and if so, with what method? Apart from ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s list, it is evident from the literary activities we have inherited that all Muslim schools believed in the interpretability of the Quran and each established one or more methods to arrive at the meanings of the Word of God. Sooner or later all Muslim schools came to believe that there was a role for the individual exegete in the interpretation of the Quran. The authority to interpret the Quran would never be limited solely to the Prophet, the Imams, or the early generations. What ʿAbd al-Jabbār did not make clear was that he was describing the extreme views among the exegetes and not the mainstream camps, which were never fully hermetic; the fact of the matter is that few if any exegetes adhered to only one of the rigid methods he listed. All major schools shared, to varying degrees, some aspects of the different available methods. What existed was a variety of theories that were shared by most.
What were the methods used in classical Quranic interpretation? At the center of the craft of Quranic commentary stands the philological method. Philology, which was formulated as a science early in Islamic culture, proved to be such a force that sooner or later all major Islamic schools had to answer to its overwhelming dominance as the hermeneutical paradigm. Playing by the rule of philology became a must for any system, if it were to survive and withstand pressure from other competing schools. The Sunnis and soon the Shiites adopted the philological method in their Quranic commentaries, but they were not so naive as to cede to it full control. Indeed, neither were the Muʿtazilites. Although all schools adopted philology into an already existing pattern, each also attempted to curb philology in order to preserve the theological coherence it was trying to present.
The history of Quranic commentary, hence, is the history of the interaction between philology and the other hermeneutical paradigms already in existence. This creative tension stood behind and explains the never-ending cycle of productivity: the tafsīr genre is one of the most complex of Islamic literatures precisely because of the precarious position of each school’s claims in light of the probing eyes of philology. The dominance of philology meant that it presented an internal threat to each school, since each school was left with little choice but to adopt philology as the main method for interpretation; thus tafsīr was an unstable field even inside the confines of each traditional Islamic school. Proponents of each school were cognizant of the danger that philology presented, and they repeatedly attempted, without much success, to rid their systems of the dominance of philology.
The Sunni camp gave to the exegetical material claiming to come from the Prophet, the Companions, and their Followers undisputed authority in the hierarchy of methods. Sunnism thus preserved some aspects of the early position of its proponents—that only Muhammad or his immediate followers could interpret the Quran. The Prophetic exegetical lore was canonized in the Sunni Ḥadīth collections under chapters specifically assigned to tafsīr. The material from the Companions and their Followers was the backbone of the exegetical Sunni lore and was collected first in individual works and finally summed up in the commentaries of al-Ṭabarī and al-Thaʿlabī.
But this inherited material constituted only one part of the Sunni exegetical outlook. The philological works that had been meanwhile produced on the Quran by grammarians were also incorporated. Thus all the works of pre-Ṭabarī grammarians on the Quran were admitted into his commentary, grammarians like al-Farrāʾ (d. 207/822) and Abū ʿUbaydah (d. 210/825); and all pre-Thaʿlabī grammarians who were not used by al-Ṭabarī, for example, al-Zajjāj (d. 311/923), were incorporated into al-Thaʿlabī’s Quranic commentary. In this sense Sunnism was claiming that there was no contradiction between what its early founders had said about the Quran and what grammarians were stating—even when many of the grammarians were not Sunni scholars. Sunnism was based on the plain reading of the Quran, or so the claim went.
This understanding of how Sunni hermeneutics developed is the one we are familiar with, if only because of its predominance both in the early phase of the tradition and because of the publication of al-Ṭabarī’s work and later of al-Thaʿlabī’s. But it was not the only Sunni approach. The recently published work of al-Māturīdī makes it clear now that a blatantly theological approach was also devised to inoculate Sunnism against its adversaries. Thus in addition to the voice of the founding fathers of Sunnism, al-Māturīdī gave prominence to his own theological interpretation of the Quran. Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), the leading theological-philosophical commentator on the Quran, thus has a much earlier antecedent in the tradition than we have so far realized. Tafsīr was thus from early on the medium through which Sunnism built its intellectual defenses against its adversaries.
It has become evident that the Sunni hermeneutical outlook was one of integration rather than exclusion. Any threat to the supremacy of the Sunni outlook should, if at all possible, be incorporated into the Sunni fold, and this was best done through Quranic commentary. Thus when Sufi sensibility became too dominant and too widespread an outlook, exoteric Sunnism opted to legitimize this approach to the Quran rather than attempt to resist the Sufi approach. This was done despite the evident contradiction between the Sufi hermeneutics—which spoke of an inner meaning (bāṭin) to the Quran that was not the same as the outer meaning (ẓāhir)—and the fundamental claim of philology that there was no inner meaning for a text beyond its surface structure. Al-Thaʿlabī, who studied with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021), the author of Ḥaqāʾiq al-tafsīr (The Realities of Exegesis), the most influential early Sufi Quranic commentary, incorporated much of the Sufi interpretive material into what was a mainstream Sunni work. One generation later, Abu’l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) was writing Sufi Quranic commentaries as if that is how Sunnis always composed tafsīr. Sunnism rarely bothered to offer a coherent defense of this contradiction in its hermeneutical heritage.14 It pretended that this is how things were always done!
Each such resolution, however, carries with it the seeds of its destruction; philology could rebel and traditionalism could decide to suffocate, while mysticism in its extreme form could opt for an antinomian disregard for the writ of the law. These were options available to Sunni exegetes, and certain camps at different historical junctures pursued them to many possible ends. Why put up with inherited material if philology proves them wrong and is ultimately capable of discovering the true meaning of any text, even the Divine? This was of course the supposed Muʿtazilite position, but Sunnism was capable of such variations, and it fostered a strong philological exegetical current that attempted to undo the predominance of the inherited traditions. The attraction of this path was that it allowed Sunnism to seem as intellectually solid as any Muʿtazilite system. The major instigator of this rebellion was Abu’l-Ḥasan al-Wāḥidī (d. 468/1076) in his magnum opus, al-Basīṭ, which is still unedited.15
It is not that traditional material was fully jettisoned, so much as drowned in a flood of a philological interpretation. Quranic commentaries were reading now like grammar handbooks and not like works of Ḥadīth. The belligerent tone of al-Wāḥidī would eventually be dropped; there was no need to rub it in the faces of fellow traditionalist Sunni exegetes. Those who knew were aware not to rock the boat; yet an accomplished exegete such as Abū Ḥayyān al-Gharnāṭī (d. 745/1344) did not mince his words when pushed to the wall by the advocates of the traditionalist Sunni camp, those who called for the supremacy of the inherited material over and above philology. He would growl at the inanity of fellow Sunni traditionalist exegetes and mock the noble fathers they so admired if need be!16 But on the whole there was a guarded deference to the early Sunni layer, and homage was always paid to it even by radical grammarians. Other major figures in this current were al-Samīn al-Ḥalabī (d. 756/1355) and Ibn ʿĀdil al-Dimashqī (d. 880/1475), bulwarks of the philological method and the mainstay of intellectual hermeneutics of classical Islam.17
The traditionalist camp was meanwhile biding its time. The early full-fledged Quranic commentaries that gave prominence to inherited material over and above philology were presented in a meek voice, as one hermeneutical option among many and not as the only way to compose tafsīr. Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 327/938) was the first, it seems, to write a commentary in which inherited material was the only material to be offered. This was done not to unseat the mainstream method, but simply as a supplementary work. So also, it seems, did Ibn Mardawayh (d. 401/1010), whose work is lost. These works were on the fringe of the Sunni classical tradition, so much so that even the championship of Ibn Taymiyyah and the devotion of al-Suyūṭī could not save these works from being lost.
It was Ibn Taymiyyah who laid the intellectual foundation for this trend. His call, written in a hermeneutical manifesto, to solidify the traditionalist current in tafsīr was first answered by his student Ismāʿīl ibn ʿUmar ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373) in his Tafsīr ibn Kathīr. Yet even Ibn Kathīr was unable to escape the burden of the established method for writing Quranic commentaries and ended up updating al-Ṭabarī by incorporating Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī and a smattering of Prophetic traditions. Ibn Kathīr was, however, never noticed by the mainstream exegetical tradition, at least not until the thirteenth/nineteenth century. It was al-Suyūṭī who wrote the masterpiece of the traditionalist camp titled al-Durr al-manthūr (The Precious Pearl). Having surfaced so late, this traditionalist current never managed to overrun the manner in which tafsīr was done—at least not till the fourteenth/twentieth century.18 Sunni medieval and early modern hermeneutics remained attached to the solution devised by al-Ṭabarī and al-Thaʿlabī, in which the blending of the different methods available was the norm.
It has been mentioned that tafsīr was remarkably diverse and dynamic in its own methods. For example, if one read all the output in tafsīr up to the time of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) and then picked up his Quranic commentary, Mafātīḥ al-ghayb (Keys of the Unseen, also known as al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, or The Great Commentary), one would be astounded to realize that nothing in the tafsīr tradition could have prepared one to read this work. Coming to the work from the mainstream tafsīr tradition, or from the fringe for that matter, one would find the work simply unintelligible. Had one read works of philosophers and theologians such as Abū ʿAlī ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 428/1037) and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazzālī (d. 505/1111), however, then the work would be readily comprehensible.
The transformation of the craft of tafsīr into a philosophical-theological enterprise at the hands of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī is a good example that illustrates the role of tafsīr in the intellectual history of Islam. However, in order to fulfill the function of tafsīr, al-Rāzī was forced to forgo all previous methods of tafsīr and rely on a science never before used for exegeses. Sunnism had already offered many solutions to the philosophical challenge, from fully Islamicizing it to fully rejecting it. Yet apparently nothing received the imprimatur of orthodoxy unless it became part of tafsīr. In this sense tafsīr was making an understanding of the entire world seem to issue from the Quran.
The history of Shiite Quranic commentary mirrors that of the Sunni tradition. The early phase of Shiite tafsīr was as stridently partisan as that of Sunnism. The early Shiite hermeneutical practice was based on two premises, both formulated in contradistinction to the Sunni theory. The first was that the language of the Quran has an inner meaning (bāṭin) in addition to the literal meaning (ẓāhir). The second premise was that this inner meaning can only be made manifest through the interpretations offered by the Imams (the Divinely guided leaders of the community). The two major figures in early Shiite exegesis are Furāt ibn Furāt al-Kūfī (d. ca. 310/922) and ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm al-Qummī (d. 328/939). When read thus, the Quran spoke of the truth of the claims of the Shiites and the supremacy of the role of the Imam along with the Prophet for salvation.
The classical phase of Shiite Quranic commentary, however, adopted the major strategy of Sunni hermeneutics: the supremacy of philology as a supporting tool for the theological claims of the school. Later on, much of the radicalism of the early Shiite exegetes was simply dropped or explained away, most notably the suspicion raised about the integrity of the codex of the Quran. Two great scholars represent this stage: Muḥammad ibn Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī (d. 460/1067) and Abū ʿAlī al-Ṭabrisī (d. 548/1153–54), whose respective works, al-Tibyān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān (Elucidation Regarding the Exegesis of the Quran) and Majmaʿ al-bayān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān (Confluence of Elucidation in the Exegesis of the Quran), remain foundational in the Shiite tradition. The early phase of the tradition, however, refused to disappear.19 Indeed, it witnessed a major comeback in Safavid Iran with the resurgence of a new Shiite dynasty and the flourishing of Shiite scholarship.20 In fact, the last major tafsīr written in the classical style is that of the Shiite scholar Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1401/1981), al-Mīzān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān (The Balance in the Exegesis of the Quran), which combines elements of al-Ṭūsī, al-Ṭabrisī, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī among others.
This so far has been a sketch of the genre, a bare outline that attempts to give a narrative of its development and evolution. Yet it can purport to be at most a provisional outline. Not even the published corpus of tafsīr has been fully analyzed, let alone the works that are still unpublished. The caveat must be repeated that we are far from any meaningful history of the genre, and our own generalizations are often proven wrong after the slightest investigation.
Another example of the significance of tafsīr for our understanding of Islamic religious history can be given here. One of the most researched fields in Islamic studies is the interaction between Islam and Christianity, on the one hand, and Islam and Judaism, on the other. The vast literature on this topic has never offered us an example of a Muslim using the Bible for religious purposes. The old wisdom was that because of the rise of the doctrine of taḥrīf, or alteration, the idea that the Bible has been corrupted, Muslims never used it for guidance or as a source of truth. When medieval Muslims used the Bible, it was either for polemics or apologetics. Yet a medieval exegete, Abu’l-Ḥasan Ibrāhīm al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480), decided to use the Bible as a source to interpret the Quran. He incorporated large sections of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament into his Quranic commentary in order to elucidate the Quran, despite the objections of some major scholars of his time.21 Al-Biqāʿī overturned a ban on the use of the Bible and enshrined it in tafsīr as a holy text for Muslims to read. The reinvestigation of a single Quranic commentary thus overturns all received wisdom as to how Muslims interacted with the Bible.
The works produced in the tafsīr tradition may be divided into three categories based on their function and degree of comprehension. Such a division avoids the problems associated with attempts made so far to divide works according to methods or content, such as that of Ignaz Goldziher, who divided the commentary tradition into discrete modes such as grammatical, doctrinal, mystical, sectarian, and modern.22 The problem with such an approach is that most Quranic commentaries use more than one method and are concerned with more than one issue.
The first category of tafsīr works is what I term encyclopedic commentaries. These were commentaries written at crucial moments in the history of the genre and were usually the culmination of trends in the field. They acted as repositories of material and were usually very catholic in their outlook, aiming to include as many new views as possible. Encyclopedic commentaries were the locus in which Sunnism and Shiism attempted to answer the challenges posed to the Quran by insisting that the Quran had answered those challenges already. Among the major figures who wrote such works were al-Māturīdī, al-Ṭabarī, al-Thaʿlabī, al-Ṭūsī, al-Ṭabrisī, Abu’l-Futūḥ al-Rāzī (d. 525/1131), Ibn ʿAṭiyyah (ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq ibn Ghālib ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, d. 541/1147), Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1272), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, al-Biqāʿī, and Abū Ḥayyān al-Gharnāṭī, some of whom have already been mentioned. They wrote multivolume works that aimed to consolidate the major developments in the tradition. The Islamic tradition knew to give this kind of composition a name: muṭawwalāt al-tafsīr, “the lengthy works.”23
The second kind of tafsīr works is what I term madrasah-style commentaries (called by the tradition al-mukhtaṣarāt, or “summaries”). These usually were based on encyclopedic works or written with a specific method in mind, such as giving only Sufi interpretations to the whole of the Quran. Authors who wrote madrasah-style commentaries include Naṣr ibn Muḥammad al-Samarqandī (d. 373/983), al-Sulamī, al-Wāḥidī, al-Zamakhsharī, and al-Bayḍāwī.
The third type of tafsīr is the glosses (ḥāshiyyah) on the madrasah-style commentaries. The two works that were usually glossed were those of al-Zamakhsharī and al-Bayḍāwī. It is rather unfortunate that not a single study in Western scholarship has ever been devoted to any of these glosses. Major figures of the scholastic tradition, such as Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390), left us glosses on both of the two commentaries, and these are important sources for the cultural history of classical Islam.
Tafsīr has always been at the center of Islamic intellectual history, the prism through which the Quran has been mediated to believers. In the traditional Islamic world, the Quran was and is understood through the language of tafsīr, and much of what Muslims believe the Quran is stating is actually what tafsīr says it is. Thus the significance of tafsīr in the religious history of Islam is paramount. Since tafsīr is both a communal endeavor—it was bound by a tradition—and an individual endeavor—exegetes were at liberty to depart from that particular tradition—it has managed to survive into modern times almost unscathed. Tafsīr as a genre did not need institutions to support it; nor was it beholden to the power or lack thereof of the ʿulamāʾ, those religious scholars recognized as having the authority to interpret the Quran and help others understand it. Today there is a new situation in which modern Muslim intellectuals who are not ʿulamāʾ, including many Western-trained Muslims, engage in this activity. Tafsīr now is practiced by almost anyone who intends to make a claim about Islam.
Tafsīr still plays a central role in defining the religious outlook of many Muslims. It is one of the most active fields in Islamic religious writing and much of the discussion among contemporary Muslims takes place in tafsīr works. The scholarly study of modern tafsīr unfortunately has all but died out in the West, and we lack any overview of the development of the genre for the last two hundred years.24 What we sorely need is a study of the political and social factors involved in the composition of Quranic commentaries and the cultural battles that are waged through the writing and publishing of tafsīr works. Most scholars of modern Islam pay little heed to what is being published of classical works and assume that to study modern tafsīr one only needs to study contemporary works. The problem with this attitude is that it disregards classical books of tafsīr as inspiration for modern works and as “ideological” works in their own right. Hence the politics of publishing in the Islamic world is of paramount significance in the study of modern Islamic religious development.
Four major trends can be noted in modern Islamic tafsīr: the modernizing, the Salafī, the classical, and the fundamentalist. The modernizing and the fundamentalist trends share the same hermeneutical outlook; both have escaped the dictates of the tradition and see fit to interpret the Quran according to an ideological stance. One has modernity as its guiding principle, the other a militant outlook. Both also seem to have had only a limited appeal to the general Muslim public. The Salafī trend, which is increasingly the norm in Sunni lands, attempts to leapfrog over a thousand years of Islamic scholarship in order to return to an imagined golden age of the first Islamic centuries. In the field of tafsīr it does this by denigrating many of the most important classical tafsīr works and elevating the medieval traditionalist current in tafsīr as represented by Ibn Kathīr and al-Suyūṭī. Meanwhile, the richness and complexity of classical mainstream tafsīr has been pushed to the side, and the classical trend is kept alive among intellectuals only through the selective publication of medieval classics. Finally, mention should be made of what can be called the modern Sufi pietistic sensibility, which has been gaining more ground recently. A major result of this new trend in Sufism is that Sufi hermeneutics is witnessing a comeback after it suffered in the early fourteenth/twentieth century. Modern Shiite interpretation shows the same trends we see manifested in Sunni developments, although the Shiite tradition has managed to keep the craft mostly in the hands of professional religious scholars.