Walid Saleh

This research is a translation of an article by Walهd A. Saleh, entitled) The Qur'an Commentary of Al-Baydhawi: The History of "Anwar Al-Tanzeel", which traces the story of the rise and fall of Al-Baydhawi' s interpretation, and the intellectual-scientific relationship between the legacy of the annotation to it and the footnotes of Al-Kashshaf. It discusses the exaggeration in the claim of the extinction of the Mu'tazila doctrine, the beginning of the history of Anwar Al-Tanzeel, the situation in the Iranian, Turkish and Non-Arab regions of Iraq, and Anwar Al-Tanzeel in the western Islamic world and Cairo in the ninth-fifteenth centuries. It also deals with the relationship between Al-Biqaei

This article charts the complex reception history of the Qurān commentary of az-Zamakhsharī, al-Kashshāf. his commentary became the textbook used to teach tafsīr in the madrasas oftheIslamic world and a large number of glosses)hawāshī(were written on this work. he problem so far has been that we are unable to judge or study these glosses because we lack any criteria to measure their significance and their use in the medieval tradition. his article uses three documents to offer our first attempt at ranking and clarifying the significance of the most important glosses written on al-Kashshāf.

The Qur’an commentary Anwār al-tanzīl of al-Bayḍāwī (d. 719/1319) was one of the most important works
of the Islamic religious tradition. As a universally adopted Sunni text for teaching tafsīr, it was ubiquitous,
read even in Safavid Iran. This was a work used by all Sunni schools, and as such was beyond the legal
divisions of madhāhib. The history of this work is, however, uncharted. This article follows the trajectory of
this work and traces the history of its rise to predominance, when and why it was adopted, and how the new
significance it gained after the ninth/fifteenth century was projected back to the period it was written. It
explores how the Anwār replaced al-Zamakhsharī’s (d. 538/1144) al-Kashshāf in scholarly circles in Cairo
before going on to gain universalised authority in the Ottoman realms. Following this, I address the
deep-rooted connections that existed between the scholars of Cairo and Istanbul, and how late Mamluk
developments in Cairo came to full fruition in Istanbul. The eclipse of the Anwār by the Qur’an commentary
of Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1372) in the twentieth century is also outlined, and a list of the published glosses of
Anwār is supplied in an appendix.

Q. 43 contains one of the most trenchant defense of the Gods of Mecca preserved by the Qur'an.  The Meccans refuse to cede to Muhammad on any of his preaching, and they call into question the radical monotheism he is presenting them by wondering why is their Gods any less different than Jesus.

There has been a trend in recent scholarship on the Qur'an to downplay the role of Muḥ ammad in delivering and preaching the Qur'an, such that one is presented with an almost disembodied Qur'an, a Qur'an that has no relationship to the career of Muḥ ammad, and is even without a relationship to a specific locale. This approach to the Qur'an is sometimes expressed radically (Muḥ ammad did not exist!) or covertly (by ignoring the role of his character as an element in the explication of the Qur'anic text). Milder versions of this position state that there is not much to know about the relationship between Muḥ ammad and the Qur'an. The disappearing of Muḥ ammad from the Qur'an, and the pretence that it has no preacher, allow for a radical rereading of the Qur'an, such that one can then claim not only that it is an outgrowth of a Christian preaching environment but that the Qur'an's main audience was a Biblically-saturated (or a Christian or Halakhic-inclined) community. Mecca disappears (for some, literally) from the map, and Muḥ ammad becomes, if not a legendary figure, inconsequential. 1 Yet this is not the only reason to revisit the topic of Muḥ ammad in the Qur'an: most Qur'an specialists take (and have always taken) the historical existence of Muḥ ammad as a given, and so nowadays do most of the radical revisionists. There is actually a more serious issue at hand. Our Fragestellung about what the Qur'an has to tell us about Muḥ ammad is deeply problematic. It is what I call biographically conceived, seeking to reconstruct a life of Muḥ ammad in the manner of a nineteenth-century outline of the bourgeois comprehensive and comprehensible life. Having cast the Sīra nabawiyya aside, our turn to the Qur'an has proven disappointing, entailing a total disregard of what we could learn about Muḥ ammad from the Qur'an. 2 The Qur'an is unlike the Gospels, we are repeatedly told; there is no sustained biography of Muḥ ammad there to be found; and no chronological order is discernible in the ordering of its parts. Indeed, the mantra that the Qur'an does not tell us much about Muḥ ammad is now a truism in

Like citizens in the 19 th century European landscape, words have become inalienable, with a fixed meaning that was impossible to forfeit or eradicate. This untranslatable and fixed meaning became the mode of understanding linguistic borrowing in Orientalist philological discourse of the late 19 th and early 20 th century. Words were seen as autonomous citizens, incapable of losing their original meaning, a meaning that shone with a light of its own and was impossible to efface regardless of what new use the borrowed word was put to in a different language. It was a light which no borrowing could hide. A word could be masqueraded, but no serious scholar would mistake it for what it had adorned itself with; with some effort, an enlightened philologist could uncover the charade, expose the conceit and lay bare the true meaning of the original word. Authenticity now became something material, a substantive characteristic of existence that adhered to the word regardless of historical or linguistic contexts. The " original " meaning was the authentic one, the inalienable one, and the normative and operative one. It did not matter how many migrations it underwent and into how many new languages it was incorporated. Borrowing was seen as a degenerative process: for the move to a new linguistic environment meant that the word had degenerated and became less authentic. This perceived process gave even more significance to the rhetoric of authenticity. This romantic and a-historical approach to word borrowing and semantic development in a Semitic language's borrowing process is perhaps one of the most persistent features of Qur ¯ anic studies, a discipline too fond of erudition to give up on this etymological fallacy. James Barr has laid bare the pernicious effects of etymological studies in Biblical studies. 1 I did the same in a long article on the foundations of the et

The Taʾwīlāt ahl al-sunna of al-Māturīdī, an exegete contemporaneous with al-Ṭabarī, is now available in three editions; we have no excuse for not consulting it. But the issue is not merely a matter of inspecting yet another of the Qur'an commentaries available. Rather, as will become apparent in this article, we have in the work of al-Māturīdī a fundamental early work that will revolutionise how we understand the development of the genre of tafsīr in medieval Islam. Recognising the central significance of the Taʾwīlāt will allow us to incorporate it as a major source alongside al-Ṭabarī, and will have profound implications for how we have been studying al-Ṭabarī and tafsīr as a whole. Tafsīr seen through the Taʾwīlāt al-Qurʾān looks different; it was pursued differently and speaks to a manner of doing tafsīr that al-Ṭabarī pretended did not exist. Al-Ṭabarī’s work must be read alongside al-Māturīdī’s: only then will we be able to fully grasp the significance of what al-Ṭabarī achieved. When read in this light, al-Ṭabarī is shown to be far more ideological, far more radical in his work, than we have hitherto realised. He was not gathering the Sunnī collective memory so much as reshaping it. Therefore, his work should be regarded as a representative of one particular type of tafsīr activity, rather than as the epitome of mainstream Sunnī Qur'an interpretation.

What is the significance of the encounter of al-Biqai with the Bible, and can one use this episode to reflect on the relationship between the Islamic tradition and the Bible.  The author uses the Reuchlin encounter to address the issue of emotions or their absence in the Islamic tradition about the Bible.

Al-Biqa`i quoted the four Gospels in a unique fashion in his Qur'an commentary Nazm al-Durar.  He fashioned a harmony based on Mark's Gospel and proceeded to fashion what can only be called an Islamic Diatessaron.  This article shows how he cited his material in detail.

This work is both an introduction to the genre of classical tafsir and a detailed study of one of its major architects, al-Tha`labi (d. 427/1035).  The book offers a detailed study of the hermeneutical principles that governed al-Tha`labi's approach to the Qur'an, principles which became the norm in later exegetical works.  It is divided into three main sections: the first outlines the life and times of the author; the second is a detailed study of his major exegetical work, al-Kashf; the third charts a brief history of the genre of tafsir through documenting the reactions of later exegetes to al-al-Kashf.  This works brings together material never examined before and tries to offer a new way of understanding the history of Qur'an exegesis

The history of publication of Tafsir works is connected to the patronage of Royal houses and official state presses at the beginning of printing in the Arab and Islamic world.  This lecture discusses the history of Tafsir printing and how to understand its development.