Recent Flowering of Classical Tafsir Translations

Reviewed by: Muzaffar Iqbal - Center for Islamic Sciences, Canada

Books Reviewed:

ABD AL-RAZZAQ KASHANI: A SUFI COMMENTARY ON THE QUR’AN, TA’WILAT AL-QUR’AN – VOLUME 1, translated by Feras Hamza. Cambridge, UK: The Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and The Islamic Text Society, 2021, 592 pp. ISBN: 9781911141440.

ABD AL-RAZZAQ KASHANI: A SUFI COMMENTARY ON THE QUR’AN, TA’WILAT AL-QUR’AN – VOLUME 2, translated by Khalid Williams. Cambridge, UK: The Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and The Islamic Text Society. 2021. 690pp. ISBN: 9781911141457.

FAKHRAL-DINAL-RAZI, THEGREATEXEGESIS, AL-TAFSIRAL-KABIR. VOLUME 1: THE FATIHA, translated by Sohaib Saeed. Cambridge, UK: The Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and The Islamic Text Society, 2020 (reprint 2020), 501pp. ISBN: 9781911141211.

TABARI: SELECTIONS FROM THE COMPREHENSIVE EXPOSITION OF THE INTERPRETATION OF THE VERSES OF THE QUR’AN (2 Volumes), translated by Scott C. Lucas. Cambridge, UK: The Royal Aal Al- Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and The Islamic Text Society, 2017, 1196pp, ISBN: 9781911141273.

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A unique development in the last two decades has transformed access to the classical scholarship on the Qur’an: technological developments made it possible for individuals and institutions to upload hundreds of classical works to public-access platforms. This was done in a haphazard manner and mostly propelled by pious motives, but it made a vast range of the classical Tafsir corpus available to readers and scholars alike. This unprecedented access, however, has not translated into a corresponding increase in readership—or even scholarly studies—on these tomes of reflection on the Book that remains at the heart of everything Islamic. Although the modern dis-inheritance of the Islamic scholarly tradition is a complex issue, it involves at base both contemporary readers’ inability to read classical Arabic and their lack of training in reading these works.

The first difficulty is being slowly overcome by a mini-translation movement to translate these works into English. The Amman-based Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought (RABIIT) is leading this effort. It commissioned translations of eight classical Tafsirs into English around 2005; seven of these have been published.1 All four works being reviewed here were published by RABIIT in partnership with the Islamic Text Society.

The original texts of the one complete and two partial translations under review here were written over a span of five centuries (the late-3rd to early-8th). Together these works represent three distinct strands of the Tafsir tradition: (i) the two-volume Selections from Jami[ al-bayan [an ta’wil ay al-Qur’an of Abu Ja[far Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari (224-25/839-310/923), which preserved for all later generations three centuries of exegetical reflections an isnad-based encyclopaedic work wherein Tabari cites reports from over 425 scholars; (ii) The Great Exegesis, the first volume of Mafatih al-ghayb of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (544-606/1149-1210), the largest pre-modern Tafsir, which combines transmitted reports with extensive forays into a wide range of subjects including philosophy, linguistics, various sciences, commentaries on previous Tafsirs, and so much more that it was caricatured as a tafsir containing everything but tafsir by more than one critic; and