The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī: A History of Anwār al-tanzīl Walid A. Saleh UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO Thank the Lord that in the Qur’an commentary of al-Bayḍāwī we have [a text] that obviates [the use of al-Kashshāf] when we look for Qur’an commentaries that specialise in rhetoric.1 In his universal history of Qur’an commentary, Muḥammad Fāḍil Ibn ʿĀshūr (d. 1970), the Grand Mufti of Tunisia for most of the twentieth century, states that he considers al-Bayḍāwī’s (d. 719/1319) Anwār al-tanzīl to be the crowning achievement of the Islamic commentary tradition on the Qur’an.2 He also notes that the Anwār became the standard tafsīr used in teaching the science of Qur’an commentary all over the Islamic world, and that hundreds of glosses (or super-commentaries, ḥawāshī) were written on this work by the professors who taught it.3 Anwār al-tanzīl was thus the prism through which Islamic civilisation understood the Qur’an and, according to the historical narrative of Ibn ʿĀshūr, it was the culmination of seven centuries of development and perfection of the tafsīr genre, a reason for its continuous sway across the following centuries. Ibn ʿĀshūr was a remnant of a scholastic Ashʿarī–Sunni tradition that was all but wiped out by the deluge that is Salafism. Still, he remembered his history too well to subscribe to the new Salafī narratives told about Qur’an commentaries. Ibn ʿĀshūr’s valiant defence notwithstanding, the ubiquity and complete dominance of the Anwār, however, had been displaced by the middle of the twentieth century, and apart from the seminaries which still used this work as a text book due to their conservative curriculum, the Anwār had been replaced by Ibn Kathīr’s Qur’an commentary as the most popular tafsīr among Sunni Muslims. The story of the rise and fall of the Anwār has never been told, and given how central the debate about the Qur’an among Muslims is, a historical account of this once authoritative Qur’an commentary is overdue. Ibn ʿĀshūr’s astute historical acumen made him one of the few modern Muslim historians (if not the only one) to rightly insist that Anwār al-tanzīl was the most important work in the history of the tafsīr genre, yet he was mistaken about the details Journal of Qur’anic Studies 23.1 (2021): 71–102 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/jqs.2021.0451 © Centre of Islamic Studies, SOAS www.euppublishing.com/jqs 72 Journal of Qur’anic Studies of how its dominance came about. He projected the popularity of the Anwār back to the moment it was written, in the late seventh/thirteenth century, whereas, I argue here, actually the popularity of this work accrued gradually; it became ubiquitous only after the beginning of the eleventh/seventeenth century. Ibn ʿĀshūr could not conceive that prior to the adoption of Anwār al-tanzīl by the Sunni establishment, al-Kashshāf, the Qur’an commentary written by the Muʿtazilī al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), was the textbook used by the Sunnis in their seminaries, and that it took a few centuries for the Anwār to replace it. Looking back at the abundance of glosses on al-Kashshāf and their extensive citation in the glosses on the Anwār, Ibn ʿĀshūr presumed that the glosses on al-Kashshāf written by Muslim scholars reflected their interest in the Anwār. His argument was that since Anwār al-tanzīl was a work that summarised and reshaped al-Kashshāf, any academic study of the Anwār must have entailed serious attention to the archetype, hence the obsessive scholarly interest of the Muslims in al-Kashshāf.4 I would argue that the story, however, is more convoluted, and this article attempts to outline the history of Anwār al-tanzīl and how radically the modern era reshaped both the history of the tafsīr genre and the hierarchy of Qur’anic exegetical texts among Muslims. Ibn ʿĀshūr’s 1966 assessment of the Anwār as the most important Qur’an commentary in Islamic history stood against the emerging new narratives among Muslim scholars who were not only championing ḥadīth-based Qur’an commentaries but also endorsing the work of Western historians of tafsīr for whom al-Ṭabarī (d. 311/923) was the most important Qur’an commentator. Furthermore, the rise of a Salafī historiography of tafsīr among modern Muslims meant that Ibn Kathīr’s (d. 774/1372) and al-Suyūt ̣ī’s (d. 911/1505) Qur’an commentaries, which were previously marginal works, came to be seen as authoritative.5 Conversely, al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl was treated like an insignificant work in the standard history of the field written by the Azharī scholar Muḥammad al-Dhahabī in 1944.6 The same perfunctory consideration was meted out by Ibrāhīm Rufaydah in his massive two-volume work on the history of tafsīr in 1982.7 Anwār al-tanzīl was all but forgotten, or if remembered, treated as just another title among many from the medieval period.8 This rapid decline in its fortunes is all the more remarkable because even at the end of the nineteenth century, the predominant status of the Anwār was not in dispute. The Overstated Death of Muʿtazilism If you were to visit any seminary in the Islamic world in the eighth/fourteenth century, you would have found that al-Zamakhsharī’s al-Kashshāf was the most authoritative Qur’an commentary used by the Sunnis. Al-Kashshāf was a Muʿtazilī Qur’an commentary which became dominant around the same time that the theological group itself went extinct. Muʿtazilism haunted Sunnism, and will always continue to haunt it, whether in theology or, as I will argue here, in tafsīr. The names of scholars The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 73 who wrote glosses on this commentary read like a list of the luminaries of the Sunni-Ashʿarī scholastic tradition, from al-Taftazānī (d. 793/1390) to Qinālīzadeh (d. 979/1572).9 This was despite the fact that the work was avowedly a Muʿtazilī work, and brazenly so. It was universally admired, and few, if any, cared to reject it because of its theology. This is not to say that this state of affairs went unquestioned: there were complaints, bitter complaints, about its pre-eminent status, and many a scholar wondered how a heretical work could be the backbone of the tafsīr curriculum, but to no avail.10 Indeed, one of the earliest glosses on al-Kashshāf was an item-by-item rebuttal of every Muʿtazilī issue raised by al-Zamakhsharī: if you cannot beat them, you can at least clean them up.11 Despite this, its Muʿtazilī theology does not seem to have exercised the scholars who used it; it hardly bothered the more serious of them. Al-Kashshāf was a magisterial work on the Qur’an, and the Sunni scholastic establishment was not going to shy away from using what it considered to be a masterpiece of scholarship even though it came from the opposing camp. Al-Kashshāf’s influence went beyond the circle of professors and theologians who taught it. It was considered a turning point in the tradition of Qur’an commentary and every following major exegete was in effect responding to it. Al-Rāzī (d. 604/1207), in his massive Qur’an commentary Mafātīḥ al-ghayb, used al-Kashshāf heavily and consistently;12 al-Rāzī can in fact be said to have inaugurated the age of al-Zamakhsharī in tafsīr. The influence of al-Kashshāf is even clearer in the work of Abū Ḥ ayyān al-Gharnāt ̣ī (d. 745/1344), immodestly entitled al-Baḥr al-muḥīt ̣ (‘the Engulfing Ocean’). Al-Gharnāt ̣ī offered an extensive assessment of the worth of al-Kashshāf in the introduction to his commentary, placing it at the centre of his own commentary, and thereby making clear his opinion that this was the most important exegetical work to appear on the Qur’an.13 Al-Zamakhsharī’s al-Kashshāf was the work that defined how Qur’an commentary ought to be done and everyone else was responding to the challenges raised by it. Its dominance continued unchallenged for three centuries until an obscure work, Anwār al-tanzīl, started to be mentioned and used, and for a while, the two works were used in conjunction. Eventually al-Zamakhsharī’s work ceased to be taught in seminaries. However, both it and the major glosses written on it continued to be heavily consulted by the scholars who were now glossing and using the Anwār, hence Ibn ʿĀshūr’s confusion and conclusion that these glosses on al-Kashshāf were written due to the centrality of the Anwār. In fact, whereas Ibn ʿĀshūr claimed that the Anwār gave al-Kashshāf a lifeline and its prominence, in reality, the opposite was true.14 The widespread use of al-Kashshāf can be documented from disputations, epistles, glosses, and citations in other commentaries.15 It was admired and studied all over the Islamic world, especially among the Iranian and Turkic Eastern Ashʿarī luminaries and soon, through their influence in Cairo, became popular around the circle of Abū Ḥ ayyān al-Gharnāt ̣ī and his students. Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), a contemporary of 74 Journal of Qur’anic Studies al-Gharnāt ̣ī, would bitterly complain about this work but it would be centuries before anyone would heed his call for the reassessment of the genre of tafsīr.16 The publication of his fatwa against al-Kashshāf in 1965 in Cairo remains a milestone in the chequered history of the reception of al-Kashshāf among Muslims, proving that its influence remained a constant despite its demise.17 However, by the late ninth/fifteenth century, a perceptible trend began to emerge in Cairo that favoured the usage of Anwār al-tanzīl over al-Kashshāf. This trend eventually spread over the Islamic world after Istanbul also came to champion it and a new pan-Islamic consensus on using the Anwār as the textbook in seminaries instead of al-Kashshāf became established. The Early History of Anwār al-tanzīl Unlike the case of al-Kashshāf, the history of Anwār al-tanzīl’s dissemination is not fully clear or easy to establish. Al-Bayḍāwī lived during the early years of the Mongol Empire in Iran (ruled by the non-Muslim Īlkhānids), and was active in Shiraz and Tabriz. Josef van Ess has noted that there is a dearth of information on al-Bayḍāwī because he was living in the wake of the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of the Islamic world that disrupted the flow of information between Mongol-controlled areas and the Egyptian Mamluk Empire.18 Biographers were unable to establish his year of death, which suggests that he was a minor figure who went unnoticed at first.19 He was not one of the more famous scholars active during this period, but there is no doubt that he was a brilliant writer because a number of his works not only became best sellers very soon after they were authored, but were also recognised as some of the best works to be used in seminaries for pedagogical purposes. However, these were his works on theology and jurisprudence and little attention seems to have been paid to his Qur’an commentary, which was clearly not read even when it was mentioned by his biographers. The biographical entry for al-Bayḍāwī in Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿiyya, the famous biographical dictionary of Shāfiʿī scholars written by Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 771/1370), does mention a Qur’an commentary work but it does not give it a name, or if it did, it called it ‘An Epitome (mukhtas ̣ar) of al-Kashshāf’.20 A generation earlier, the father of Tāj al-Dīn, Taqī al-Dīn (d. 756/1348), a famous Qur’an commentator who wrote an epistle against al-Kashshāf, showed no signs in his works of any knowledge of Anwār al-tanzīl.21 Similarly, the biography in al-Ṣafadī’s (d. 764/1363) al-Wāfī bi’l-wafayāt, the earliest biography we have of al-Bayḍāwī, does not mention his commentary on the Qur’an.22 Al-Bayḍāwī was already a famous author, regarded as a well-established luminary in the history of scholarship, as al-Ṣafadī makes clear, yet there is no mention here of his Qur’an commentary. Al-Safadī was a meticulous scholar, so it would be presumptuous to dismiss this as an oversight and hold him at fault; instead we can deduce from this omission that al-Bayḍāwī was by then famous, but not as a Qur’an commentator. The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 75 Indeed, the patchiness of information about the scholarly output of al-Bayḍāwī is particularly evident in the biographical note on al-Bayḍāwī in the universal history of Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1372), where he is presented as a famous author of texts in law but is not mentioned as a Qur’an commentator. Ibn Kathīr was a student of Ibn Taymiyya, and an ideological exegete who authored a massive Qur’an commentary that would eventually be championed by the modern Salafī movement as the most authoritative Sunni Qur’an commentary. He was both a historian and a deeply learned exegete who would have known of the work of al-Bayḍāwī if it was available. Ibn Kathīr’s biography speaks of al-Bayḍāwī as a famous author, especially of his work al-Minhāj fī us ̣ūl al-fiqh, which had already been glossed.23 However, there is no mention of his Qur’an commentary. Likewise, Ibn Kathīr’s massive Qur’an commentary shows no trace of awareness of al-Bayḍāwī’s work on the Qur’an. Moreover, his teacher, Ibn Taymiyya, one of the most learned of scholars in the Islamic tradition, was also apparently unaware of a Qur’an commentary by al-Bayḍāwī. Both loathed al-Zamakhsharī, and would have jumped at the chance to champion any other work instead. Finally, the biography of al-Bayḍāwī by al-Isnawī (d. 772/1370) does mention a commentary on the Qur’an with the title Mukhtas ̣ar al-Kashshāf (‘Epitome of al-Kashshāf’), and then goes on to add that it is popularly known as Tafsīr al-Qāḍī (‘The Commentary by the Judge’; ‘the Judge’ being al-Bayḍāwī’s epithet).24 Al-Isnawī also authored a gloss on one of al-Bayḍāwī’s legal works, and his biography provides the first instance we have when someone with intimate knowledge of al-Bayḍāwī’s works also mentions his Qur’an commentary. Al-Isnawī was active almost half a century after the death of al-Bayḍāwī, and he is our clearest indication that by his time al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl was known by a shorthand name. However, the popular name he gives for al-Bayḍāwī’s commentary indicates that it was being referenced enough to have a short name, but does not prove that al-Isnawī read or used the work. There is also no firm evidence from the western parts of the Islamic world (Syria and Egypt and beyond) that al-Bayḍāwī’s Qur’an commentary was in common use: it is not mentioned in lists of works that were read or transmitted by scholars of this century. It does appear that people were aware of one thing about this work, that it was a summary of al-Kashshāf, and that this seems to be the most significant aspect about the commentary that was noticed. There is no evidence of it being read, or of anyone knowing it by its authored title, i.e. the title that was mentioned in the introduction to the work itself. This is the sum of information we have about the circulation of al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār in the western parts of the Islamic world. Although there is no study of manuscripts so far that can help us plot the transmission history of the work, I doubt such a study will unearth any significant new information. Moreover, we neither have early information on who studied or transmitted the Anwār, nor do we know at what point in 76 Journal of Qur’anic Studies al-Bayḍāwī’s life it was composed. However, the use of Anwār al-tanzīl was documented in the eastern part of the Islamic world (by which I mean the western Iranian realm) as will be demonstrated below. The Situation in the Iranian and Turkic Spheres, and Iraqi ʿajam In Iraq and the Iranian and Turkic spheres there seems to have been a need among the Sunni scholastic establishment for a bowdlerised version of al-Kashshāf that preserved its superb insights without retaining its Muʿtazilī theology. Two works, contemporaneous with Anwār al-tanzīl, can be seen as trying to fill this need. The first is Tabs ̣īrat al-mutadhakkir by al-Kawāshī (d. 680/1281), a commentary that has so far not been published and is thus inaccessible to me,25 and the other is Madārik al-tanzīl by al-Nasafī (ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad Abū al-Barakāt, d. 701/1302), which has been published.26 Al-Nasafī’s introduction does not explicitly mention al-Kashshāf but it speaks of the need for a work that is ‘adorned with the statements from the People of sunna and jamāʿa (ahl al-sunna wa’l-jamāʿa, the formal epithet for Sunnism), free of the falsehoods of the people of innovations and misguidance (ḍalāla).’27 Such a statement would have been meaningless in the seventh/thirteenth century since the triumph of Sunnism was all but complete by this time. It can only be referring to the peculiar situation in the field of tafsīr where the work of a Muʿtazilī was the authoritative one. Both works, however, failed to displace al-Kashshāf. It was also around this time that we have the first gloss written against al-Kashshāf, by Ibn al-Munayyar (d. 683/1284), who, despite being located in Egypt, was partaking in the same struggle against the Muʿtazilī al-Kashshāf.28 Glossing al-Kashshāf was one way of dealing with its Muʿtazilī material. Indeed, Ibn al-Munayyar’s work was like an amulet hung around the neck of al-Kashshāf, allowing it – I would argue – a prolonged survival in the Islamic world. It was also around this time that al-Bayḍāwī wrote his Qur’an commentary. The introduction of the Anwār mentions nothing of note about the opposing religious camps in the background. However, in the colophon for this work al-Bayḍāwī himself writes that his was a Qur’an commentary that was ‘void of religious error (iḍlāl)’.29 I have no doubt that he intended to reference al-Kashshāf in this statement, given the fact that the Anwār is squarely based on al-Kashshāf, but without the Muʿtazilī material. In fact, some Sunni exegetes were clearly worried about the pre-eminence of al-Kashshāf, and much of the tafsīr output of the seventh/thirteenth century can be seen as unsuccessful attempts to rid the madrasas of this Muʿtazilī Qur’an commentary. It is also in the colophon that we realise that al-Bayḍāwī wrote his Qur’an commentary with an eye on the seminary, a factor which clearly indicates that he consciously positioned his work as a rival to al-Kashshāf.30 Thus, Anwār al-tanzīl was originally one of many Qur’an commentaries written as a response to al-Kashshāf and it was not obvious at first that it would gain any traction as despite this movement to counteract the supremacy of The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 77 al-Kashshāf, its reign would continue unchallenged, and actually reach its zenith in the eighth/fourteenth century; it is in this century that most of the important glosses were written on al-Kashshāf.31 As an example of how prevalent and pervasive the use of al-Kashshāf was among the Sunni establishment, I now outline the biography of a marginal scholar from the eighth/fourteenth century, al-Ardubīlī (d. 749/1349) a student of the famous al-Jārabardī (d. 746/1347).32 Both scholars were situated in the city of Tabriz where al-Bayḍāwī lived and worked. This minor scholar moved to Damascus where he taught in its schools and lived until his death. Scholars like him were common in the Mamluk realm, which depended heavily on professors coming from the East. Al-Ardubīlī glossed al-Bayḍāwī’s legal work, the Minhāj, and his biographer, al-Subkī, highlights his diligence as a scholar, and dedication to scholarship by drawing attention to his study of tafsīr. Al-Subkī says that al-Ardubīlī informed him that he used to travel a long distance in Tabriz to read al-Kashshāf with a famous teacher who lived on the outskirts of the city (we are not told the name of this scholar). Thus, in al-Bayḍāwī’s home city, there was at least one scholar who glossed one of his works, and who was very interested in the study of tafsīr, but knew nothing of Anwār al-tanzīl. A look at the biography of al-Ardubīlī’s teacher, the more famous al-Jārabardī (d. 746/1347), repeats this situation, if in starker terms.33 Al-Jārabardī also wrote a gloss on al-Bayḍāwī’s Minhāj and not only did he live in the same city as al-Bayḍāwī but there are reports that he also met him.34 I am now doubtful of this information, and I think it is a retroactive connection that was constructed after the fame of al-Bayḍāwī was established. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that this connection between al-Jārabardī and al-Bayḍāwī was invented because it was feasible and believable. Al-Jārabardī was a famous exegete and a specialist on Qur’an commentary. Moreover, he was one of the select few glossers of al-Kashshāf whose gloss became authoritative in the Sunni tafsīr tradition.35 He was a specialist in teaching al-Kashshāf and taught it repeatedly without mentioning the Anwār.36 Thus, it appears that no one among al-Bayḍāwī’s circle who was interested in tafsīr had heard of his Qur’an commentary. There were other developments in Sunni tafsīr that were generated by the older schools of hermeneutics. Traditional pietistic Sunni circles, wedded to a more traditional hermeneutics of the Qur’an in which encyclopaedism and tafsīr were seen as close and necessary for each other, were not sitting idle either.37 There was a persistent endeavour on their part to keep the classical mode of Sunni exegesis viable, despite the scholastic revolution caused by the rise of new disciplines, especially the neo-Ashʿarī theology inaugurated by al-Rāzī. These pietistic circles championed al-Thaʿlabī (d. 427/1035) and his Qur’an commentary al-Kashf wa’l-bayān.38 Periodic updating and epitomising 78 Journal of Qur’anic Studies were carried out to keep it readable and relevant, especially for the purpose of making it shorter and less controversial. There was first the epitome by al-Baghawī (d. 516/1122), entitled Maʿālim al-tanzīl, that was written just before al-Zamakhsharī wrote his Qur’an commentary. This Maʿālim was one of the most copied and popular works of tafsīr among Sunnis across the ages. It was, however, already an old-fashioned work by the time it was published and its popularity was due to its accessibility; one could say it was a bestseller that many found easy to read and cheap to buy. A second, post-Zamakhsharī attempt to update al-Thaʿlabī’s legacy was al-Khāzin’s (d. 725/1324) Lubāb al-taʾwīl, which was based on al-Baghawī’s Maʿālim. Thus, a cascading chain was created: al-Kashf, then Maʿālim, then Lubāb, each deriving from its predecessor.39 Al-Khāzin was a contemporary of al-Bayḍāwī and was undoubtedly attempting to offer a replacement for al-Kashshāf. His introduction clearly shows that he was aware of seminarians (t ̣ullāb) who needed accessible reliable works.40 These two abridgments of al-Thaʿlabī’s al-Kashf were very popular, but neither became seminary works, nor were glosses written on them. Moreover, they were not popular among the neo-Ashʿarī theologians and one can argue that theologians were using al-Kashshāf as a differentiating text between themselves and the people of ḥadīth and their ilk. The earliest use of Anwār al-tanzīl in the exegetical literature, or at least in any surviving work that I could find, is in a work entitled Futūḥ al-ghayb fī al-kashf ʿan qināʿ al-rayb (henceforth Futūḥ al-ghayb). This is actually a gloss by a certain al-Ṭībī (d. 743/1342) on al-Kashshāf.41 Although forgotten for most of the last two centuries and only published in the past few years, this used to be a very famous work, a massive multi-volume tafsīr, and one of the most authoritative glosses on al-Kashshāf. It was established soon after its appearance as one of the most important reference works in tafsīr all over the Islamic world. Al-Ṭibī lived in the eastern parts of Iran and in lower Iraq, and there are clear indications that he either lived in or visited Tabriz and was thus close to the circles around al-Bayḍāwī. Thus, Anwār al-tanzīl was picked up rather early by an author writing one of the glosses on al-Kashshāf; in fact, the Anwār was a major source for Futūḥ al-ghayb. However, this did not seem to have translated into immediate popularity for Anwār al-tanzīl nor did it mean that it was available to people who were reading Futūḥ al-ghayb. The use of the Anwār in Futūḥ al-ghayb is extensive and shows clear awareness of the significance of this work for evaluating the work of al-Zamakhsharī.42 Yet this is an anomaly in the history of the reception of Anwār al-tanzīl that was not repeated for over a century. We are thus left with a mystery: Anwār al-tanzīl, although picked up early on by one of the major works of tafsīr, Futūḥ al-ghayb, does not seem to have its entry to the scholarly tradition through the Futūḥ. The question thus remains of how Anwār al-tanzīl gained its popularity. The only biography we have of al-Ṭībī was written by Ibn Ḥ ajar (d. 852/1449) more than a century after al-Ṭībī’s death. This reflects a general dearth of information about The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 79 Iranian-based scholars during the Īlkhānid period which is indicative of the disruption of the flow of information in the Islamic world at that historic juncture. In his entry on al-Ṭībī, Ibn Ḥ ajar praises his gloss, Futūḥ al-ghayb, and indicates that he had read the work, leaving no doubt that it was already available to scholars in Cairo.43 Ibn Ḥ ajar highlights that al-Ṭībī was a defender of Sunnism and that he rebutted the Muʿtazilī material in al-Kashshāf. He also aligned Futūḥ al-ghayb with the Egyptian glosses that were written about the Muʿtazilī material in al-Kashshāf. The introduction of Futūḥ al-ghayb, however, belies such an analysis, for it shows the high regard in which al-Kashshāf was held among the Sunni scholastic establishment.44 The praise showered on al-Kashshāf by al-Ṭibī is effusive: he goes out of his way to affirm his impartiality when raising any criticism of al-Kashshāf by assuring the reader that he only raises an objection when he has no option left.45 This praise mirrors the admiration we find in the introduction of the other major work of tafsīr that was authored in the western parts of the Islamic world in Cairo by Abū Ḥ ayyān al-Gharnāt ̣ī (d. 745/1344).46 Al-Ṭibī may have used Anwār al-tanzīl but there is no doubt that al-Zamakhsharī and his al-Kashshāf was the paramount authority and reference in his works. This might be why, even after a century, no major scholar in Cairo mentioned or cared to point out the connection between Futūḥ al-ghayb and Anwār al-tanzīl even if such a connection may have been known. Anwār al-tanzīl in the Western Islamic World and Cairo in the Ninth/Fifteenth Centuries As I have just mentioned, Cairo in the middle of the ninth/fifteenth century was aware of Futūḥ al-ghayb, the gloss that used Anwār al-tanzīl, but was not familiar with Anwār al-tanzīl itself. The question thus remains as to when did Anwār al-tanzīl move to Cairo and Damascus, for it is by being championed in these locales, as I will show, that it was established as a rival to al-Kashshāf. Ibn Ḥ ajar (d. 852/1449), the biographer of al-Ṭībī, was the most illustrious scholar of Cairo, and arguably of the entire Islamic world, in the middle of the ninth/fifteenth century. His biography by his student al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1492) is a sprawling three-volume work that documents his prodigious scholarship and lists the titles of books read and taught by this polymath.47 It makes no mention of Anwār al-tanzīl, but al-Kashshāf is mentioned. (Even more indicative of the sway of al-Kashshāf is the fact that Ibn Hajar wrote one of the most important reference works on al-Kashshāf’s prophetic traditions.48) If a scholar of Ibn Ḥ ajar’s calibre was still unaware of Anwār al-tanzīl, then it is doubtful that anyone else was. Thus, even in the middle of the ninth/fifteenth century, the only documented evidence of someone using the Anwār was from a century earlier (by al-Ṭībī in his Futūḥ al-ghayb). However, the obscurity of Anwār al-tanzīl dissipated suddenly and dramatically. 80 Journal of Qur’anic Studies Al-Biqāʿī and Anwār al-tanzīl The first clear indication that scholars and exegetes were aware of and using Anwār al-tanzīl in Cairo dates from around the time of the death of Ibn Ḥ ajar (852/1449). The first recorded evidence I could locate comes from the works of al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480), one of Ibn Ḥ ajar’s students. Al-Biqāʿī was certainly the most controversial figure of this century. The chequered and turbulent life of al-Biqāʿī has been documented, but what is not widely known about al-Biqāʿī is that he made attacking al-Kashshāf a cornerstone of his polemics against his enemies, accusing his Sunni opponents of being dupes, or worse spineless preachers who kept their mouth shut about the widespread availability of such a heretical work: at best, they were reading heretical works unwittingly.49 Accused by some of his opponents that his own Qur’an commentary was heretical, al-Biqāʿī counter-accused them of reading what was a non-Sunni work, al-Kashshāf, and of being in no position to issue judgement on him. However, al-Biqaʿī did not write a gloss on al-Kashshāf to rebut its heretical content. Instead, he made a move that changed the history of Qur’anic exegesis by becoming the first scholar to use al-Bayḍawī’s Anwār al-tanzīl as the centre of his exegetical activities. Unless new evidence is unearthed, it is now becoming clear to me that al-Biqāʿī was far more influential in the history of tafsīr than he is given credit for. His work was the first to use and champion Anwār al-tanzīl over al-Kashshāf, and this gives us a clear indication how radical and influential his career was. I also believe that al-Suyūt ̣ī (d. 911/1505), a younger contemporary of al-Biqāʿī, continued al-Biqāʿī’s work and played a decisive role in the rise of Anwār al-tanzīl. It is my opinion that he was influenced by al-Biqāʿī’s use of Anwār al-tanzīl, although he never admits to this. Al-Biqāʿī’s use of Anwār al-tanzīl as a basis for both his preaching and composing his own Qur’an commentary leaves no room for doubt that he was breaking ranks with the religious establishment at the height of al-Kashshāf’s popularity. The centrality of the Anwār in his scholarship was part of his innovative hermeneutical approach, as I have detailed before, but I have previously missed the significance of his inclusion of Anwār al-tanzīl as the cornerstone in his exegetical exercise.50 His use of the Anwār is on par with him digging up forgotten names in the exegetical tradition and championing them.51 However, as with all transitional phases of intellectual turns, al-Biqāʿī was unable to fully break from his past. He railed against al-Kashshāf but he could not rid himself from a dependence upon it: it would have been impossible at this stage for anyone to fully abandon al-Kashshāf. Thus, in an entry in his historical work, Iẓhār al-ʿaṣr li-asrār ahl al-ʿaṣr, al-Biqāʿī admits to using three works as the starting point of his own exegetical creativity: al-Zamakhsharī’s al-Kashshāf, al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl, and Abū Ḥ ayyān al-Gharnāt ̣ī’s al-Nahr.52 Al-Biqāʿī wrote his Qur’an commentary Naẓm al-durar from 860/1456 onwards, which indicates that by his time Anwār al-tanzīl was already available and accessible in Cairo. Naẓm al-durar was completed in 875/1471 and published in 882/1477, and we know from the introduction The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 81 to this that he had abandoned al-Kashshāf and had moved away from any heavy reliance on this work.53 In his introduction to this massive Qur’an commentary, al-Biqāʿī states that his Qur’an commentary is to be read in conjunction with Anwār al-tanzīl, as an accompanying book (radīf), a gloss of sorts.54 This is the first time that the Anwār is given such importance and significance in the non-gloss tafsīr tradition. Suddenly, a major exegete of ninth/fifteenth century Cairo had explicitly disregarded al-Kashshāf as the cornerstone of his exegetical project. Indications of al-Biqāʿī’s shift towards Anwār al-tanzīl can be seen documented in his other writings and research practices. In an entry from his history, Iẓhār al-ʿaṣr, he describes how he utilised Anwār al-tanzīl as the basis of his own exegetical reflections by always carrying the book with him and reading it to get inspiration.55 One can therefore presume that he had moved away from al-Kashshāf by then. Already this move is evident in his polemical treatise al-Aqwāl al-qawīma written in 873/1469. Here al-Biqāʿī quotes al-Bayḍāwī on the same footing as other exegetes, if not more so.56 He mentions al-Bayḍāwī as often as al-Zamakhsharī but clearly prefers the former over the latter as an authority on Qur’anic exegesis. Therefore, for the modern reader to read al-Biqāʿī is to realise that he treated al-Bayḍāwī as an established authority in tafsīr without additional qualifiers. Al-Suyūṭī and Anwār al-tanzīl After al-Biqāʿī, Anwār al-tanzīl was used, referenced, studied, and glossed regularly. In al-Suyūt ̣ī’s work (d. 911/1505), and in the scholarly biographies from the late ninth/fifteenth century, we find concrete evidence that Anwār al-tanzīl was being taught and used in scholastic circles, and not only by adventurous exegetes. We can also find the first documented instances of glosses written on Anwār al-tanzīl, which was not only a clear sign of scholarly prestige but also an indication that it was being taught in the madrasas. It was al-Suyūt ̣ī who wrote the first major gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl, and he wrote it as a result of his teaching it over 20 years, from 880/1476 onwards.57 Thus, Anwār al-tanzīl may have arrived late, but it arrived with a bang. Al-Suyūt ̣ī was the leading luminary of the Islamic world, and his championing of Anwār al-tanzīl was a turning point in the reception of this work: Anwār al-tanzīl had moved beyond the confines of private reading. Al-Suyūt ̣ī’s introduction of his gloss on the Anwār, Nawāhid al-abkār, is one of the finest introductions of intellectual history, and documents the reception of al-Kashshāf as a necessary prelude to a commentary on the Anwār.58 We have here a clear demonstration of the way that Anwār al-tanzīl was still seen as part of the reception of al-Kashshāf, and al-Suyūt ̣ī considered it as the finest epitome (mulakhkhas ̣) of al-Kashshāf. In doing so al-Suyūt ̣ī was continuing the scholarly tradition that saw Anwār al-tanzīl as a summary of al-Kashshāf (which incidentally goes to show that al-Biqāʿī was ahead of the curve when he treated the Anwār independently of al-Kashshāf). Al-Suyūt ̣ī is also the first scholar to provide a 82 Journal of Qur’anic Studies scholarly analysis of the work and identify the Anwār by its proper title; he calls it Anwār al-tanzīl wa-asrār al-taʾwīl. Before him, the Anwār was either referred to as Tafsīr al-Bayḍāwī or some other epithet, even by al-Biqāʿī. Anwār al-tanzīl is thus here treated as an independent work, although it is still connected to the tradition of the gloss of al-Kashshāf. The assessment of the Anwār given by al-Suyūt ̣ī in the introduction to his gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl is worth quoting in full:59 And the most illustrious of epitomes on al-Kashshāf is the book Anwār al-tanzīl al-taʾwīl wa-asrār al-tanzīl by the judge Nāṣr al-Dīn al-Bayḍāwī. He summarised al-Kashshāf and added what had developed since it was composed. He avoided Muʿtazilī material, threw away insidious interpretations, elaborated on some difficulties, and completed things that needed completion. This new book thus came out like a gold ingot and became as famous as the sun in the middle of the day. Researchers studied it intently, people praised it incessantly, and its value was recognised by the discerning. Thus, scholars and learned people dedicated themselves to studying and teaching it. It was favourably received by them, and they liked it and competed among themselves in their dedication to study it. Now they have been doing this, studying and teaching it, generation after generation, from the time it was composed by its author to the time of our teachers, in a continuous concatenation. This is the first extant scholarly assessment of al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl from someone who had read it. The praise is effusive and will set the tone for centuries to come. The most interesting statement in this quotation is the claim that Anwār al-tanzīl was transmitted and studied by consecutive generations of scholars from the time it was composed. Unless this statement can be supported by solid evidence, I am inclined to reject this claim by al-Suyūt ̣ī, and assert the opposite: there is no evidence that Anwār al-tanzīl was transmitted in this manner. Usually works of fame and immediate recognition do have such a transmission history – read and taught by the author, and then transmitted by teacher–student concatenation across generations, and surely al-Suyūt ̣ī would not have hesitated to produce such a chain if he was at its end? Instead, what I have shown so far is the perplexing obscure history of a work that became very popular much later. Al-Suyūt ̣ī then continues his assessment of Anwār al-tanzīl and tries to prove that a chain of transmission was indeed a part of its history:60 My two esteemed, perfect, and honourable teachers, the last of the learned, the masters of researchers, Taqī al-Dīn al-Shumunnī [801/1398–872/1468] and Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Kāfiyajī [c.790/1387– 879/1474] – May the Lord rain mercy on their graves and blessings on their resting grounds – used to teach and comment on this work, and The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 83 produce marvels of insights, and guide the readers to the treasures in it. But when they died, Egypt was devoid of any scholar who had their standing or any teacher who could unlock its hidden meanings. So, the book became like a treasure in a locked box, and because no one was capable of teaching it the book became neglected and was taught no more. Then God inspired me that I should start teaching it and I was determined to understand it deeply. So I started to teach it at the beginning of the year 880/1475, and I taught it for ten years consecutively, reaching the middle of Sūrat Hūd (Q. 11), and leaving no effort in investigating its content and mining its riches. I also started to write a gloss on it that solves its mysteries and unravels its complexities. People heard about what I was doing, and everyone became jealous. Suddenly everyone became interested in teaching this work again! The impetuous, both from the Arabs and the non-Arabs, those who cannot differentiate between the declensions of different Arabic words, were emboldened to teach it … Al-Suyūt ̣ī presents here a more believable narrative about the introduction of Anwār al-tanzīl to Egypt: two teachers in Cairo started to teach Anwār al-tanzīl although we are not sure exactly when and why. After they died, al-Suyūt ̣ī decided to continue this practice, and suddenly everyone was teaching it. This is a plausible narrative but suspicious in one aspect – that al-Suyūt ̣ī was the one who started this trend – because by the time he was teaching the Anwār, it had already been extensively utilised by al-Biqāʿī. Regardless of his self-serving narrative, the two professors he cites as teaching the Anwār to him are indeed connected to this work and its teaching, but they were not the only ones, as is evident from the case of al-Biqāʿī. Al-Suyūt ̣ī’s implication is that they specialised in teaching Anwār al-tanzīl and set the precedent. A closer look at their biography in the biographical dictionary of al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1492) helps clarify this connection. In the biography of al-Shumunnī we read that he ‘taught the advanced [difficult to teach] works like al-Kashshāf and al-Bayḍāwī’s work on tafsīr’.61 Al-Sakhāwī, interestingly, notes that he himself studied al-Kashshāf with al-Shumunnī.62 Al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl was not a text that was at the centre of the scholarly activities of al-Shumunnī, but clearly it had now become one of the texts that were being read and taught. Al-Kāfiyajī (d. 879/1474), the second professor mentioned by al-Suyūt ̣ī, was the leading grammarian in Cairo and a leading professor who educated multiple generations of famous scholars. He wrote over a hundred works, most famous among which are his glosses on grammatical works. According to al-Sakhāwī, al-Kāfiyajī started a work of scholarly adjudication between the different glosses on al-Kashshāf (meaning he did not finish it), and wrote an independent gloss on the 84 Journal of Qur’anic Studies Qur’an commentary of al-Bayḍāwī.63 This clearly indicates that by the middle of the ninth/fifteenth century, Anwār al-tanzīl was being taught, read, and used in scholarly circles in Cairo. However, we do have to be cautious about the implications of al-Suyūt ̣ī’s understanding of his teachers’ careers; although we can corroborate his claims that these two scholars did in fact teach or ‘write on’ Anwār al-tanzīl, it was not something that was emphasised in their biographies. Furthermore, the gloss written by one of the professors was insignificant, left no trace, and did not survive. Let us go back to al-Suyūt ̣ī’s discussion of Anwār al-tanzīl, which was interrupted by him with a rather lengthy and typical rambling on those ‘inept, inane, and amateurish upstarts’ who dared to teach it. Al-Suyūt ̣ī detailed his plan for the gloss and explicitly connects it to the glosses on al-Kashshāf:64 So, should I then leave this book [Anwār al-tanzīl], this wonderful matchless book, an unbreachable fortress, exposed to these riffraff as if it is barley bread? A book with unique qualities that can outweigh a sack of gold carried by camels. Some of them consume it, then attack it, and then imagine it has faults, because of their faulty faculties, and then refuse to fix what they claim is wrong. Some of them want to clarify it but end up obfuscating it, [as the proverb says]: thirsty and a sea is in his mouth. I thus hoarded what I wrote on Anwār al-tanzīl for twenty years, with people trying to steal it from me, or to make me publish it, and I refused … [after an attack on a particular scholar, he continues] … Then this year came, the end of the century (i.e. 900/1490), and I decided to write a final version of the work, and clean it up, and finish it to the end of the commentary. So, I gathered material, and worked tirelessly and I named it ‘Nawāhid al-abkār wa-shawārid al-afkār’. Dear reader, know that when the two books share the same material [that is when Anwār al-tanzīl has the same phrases or interpretation as al-Kashshāf] I summarised the most important material from the glosses of al-Kashshāf in my gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl. I then added to that new insights from other works like … [he names several other works that are not glosses on al-Kashshāf]. I do not copy a citation without attributing it to its source – for the blessing of knowledge is attained only when you acknowledge your sources. When I reach places in the commentary that have become celebrated problems and generated a lot of discussions, I will pause and elaborate on the issue by citing all the authorities who discussed the problem so that this work becomes useful. Now, certain issues have already become even more debated, such that individual works have been written on these issues, then in these cases, I will summarise those independent works for you. The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 85 We have here the beginnings of the entanglements of the glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl and on al-Kashshāf and we can see why. As an epitome of al-Kashshāf, Anwār al-tanzīl preserved many of the interpretations and phrases of al-Kashshāf, so much so that the glosses on al-Kashshāf could easily explain both texts. Al-Suyūt ̣ī is in many ways the midwife of Anwār al-tanzīl into scholastic respect. His gloss is significant because it became a canonical gloss, and its introduction was used by Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa in his entry, interestingly, on al-Kashshāf. I have already given a detailed analysis of the introduction and its implications for the study of the history of the reception of al-Kashshāf.65 What I would like to highlight now is that al-Suyūt ̣ī established the scholarly tradition of utilising the glosses of al-Kashshāf to illuminate Anwār al-tanzīl. Moreover, he clearly shows that the Anwār was seen as part of the reception history of al-Kashshāf, and as such a continuation of the reign of al-Zamakhsharī in tafsīr. Ibn ʿĀshūr, the Grand Mufti of Tunisia during the twentieth century, was mistaken when he claimed that al-Zamakshsharī was pulled into the history of tafsīr by the success of al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār because the reverse is the case. As is clear from the comment by al-Suyūt ̣ī that forms the epigraph of this article, the issues and controversies that had their origin in al-Kashshāf did not disappear but were carried over into the study of and commentary on Anwār al-tanzīl. Thus, the Anwār is intimately connected to al-Kashshāf not only through shared phrases but also because it is a vital link in the reception history of al-Kashshāf. Indeed, glossers on Anwār al-tanzīl felt compelled to continue reading glosses on al-Kashshāf because that was the scholarly norm. In addition to being one of the first scholars to write a gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl, al-Suyūt ̣ī was also the first major Sunni exegete to dismiss al-Kashshāf, in his introduction to the al-Taḥbīr (‘The Art of tafsīr’), and to state explicitly that al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl was a replacement for al-Kashshāf. This statement, cited in the epigraph here, is the smoking gun for what I have been trying to argue in this article: that the replacement of al-Kashshāf by Anwār al-tanzīl was a long and protracted process that was the result of a Sunni entrenchment against al-Kashshāf at the end of the Mamluk period in Cairo. The arguments presented by al-Suyūt ̣ī in his al-Taḥbīr leave no doubt that a Sunni theological impetus was the driving force behind the rise of the Anwār. In this work, al-Suyūt ̣ī singles out al-Kashshāf as a work that is completely unacceptable.66 He categorically states that the commentary of a heretic (mubtadiʿ), especially a heretic like al-Zamakhsharī, was inadmissible. He then states that his Muʿtazilī interpretations were not only heretical but seductive, claiming that al-Zamakhsharī in his al-Kashshāf not only misinterpreted the verses to support his rotten doctrines but also seduced the reader without the reader being aware of agreeing to these interpretations.67 He then cites the accusations of Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 756/1355), from his famous epistle Sabab, that al-Zamakhsharī was rude and impolite about the status of Muḥammad.68 Al-Suyūt ̣ī then repeats the warning given by al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) against al-Zamakhsharī and his al-Kashshāf in his work 86 Journal of Qur’anic Studies Mīzān al-iʿtidāl, and adds that al-Dhahabī has done good by this warning.69 Al-Suyūt ̣ī’s citation of al-Dhahabī, who was not only a member of the radical ahl al-ḥadīth but also a student of Ibn Taymiyya (who himself was a critic of al-Kashshāf) shows the lineage of al-Suyūt ̣ī’s thought and assessment of al-Kashshāf.70 Although al-Suyūt ̣ī did not quote Ibn Taymiyya on al-Zamakhsharī here, he was all too aware of his condemnation of al-Zamakshsharī as is clear in his other major work on the Qur’an, al-Itqān, in which Ibn Taymiyya is quoted as disapproving of al-Kashshāf.71 Al-Suyūt ̣ī then finishes his assessment of al-Kashshāf by admitting that it is a masterpiece in its rhetorical explanation of the Qur’an, but he thanks God for al-Bayḍāwī’s Qur’an commentary which obviated the need for it even on this point.72 I think that the compound effect of al-Biqāʿī’s rejection of al-Kashshāf, al-Suyūt ̣ī’s publication of a gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl, and the judgements on it by al-Suyūt ̣ī in his Itqān (which became the handbook for tafsīr studies in the Muslim world), paved the way for a major cultural transformation in Islamic intellectual history. This transformation was the result of a long process of an anti-Kashshāf sentiment that started with Ibn al-Munayyir and was shared by Ibn Taymiyya and his students, but also Ibn Taymiyya’s enemies like al-Subkī. This anti-Kashshāf sentiment spread swiftly in Arab provinces, especially in Egypt and Syria, and more slowly in the Ottoman realm which inherited both the gloss tradition on al-Kashshāf and the newly acquired high status of Anwār al-tanzīl as a contender for replacing it. This displacement of al-Kashshāf by the Anwār, which has so far been unrecognised, is essential for understanding the development of the tafsīr genre across the centuries. al-Anṣārī and the Anwār The last scholar that I would like to discuss from this century is Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (823–926/1420–1520), who was also a resident of Cairo.73 He was the author of a famous gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl but, more significantly, he does not mention al-Kashshāf in any of his works. He was active for most of the ninth/fifteenth century, and as a younger contemporary of al-Suyūt ̣ī and al-Biqāʿī he represented the hegemony of Cairo in the intellectual field. He was also the first to write on the Anwār while including nothing from al-Kashshāf.74 Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī was one of the last towering figures of the ninth/fifteenth century Cairo scene, and because of his longevity he educated almost all the scholars of the tenth/sixteenth century. His fame and reputation was universal, and indeed his life intersects with all the aforementioned scholars from Cairo. He was the student of Ibn Ḥ ajar and al-Kāfayajī and as such one can be certain that he knew of Anwār al-tanzīl and studied it.75 Moreover, he was involved in the controversy over Ibn al-Fāriḍ which saw al-Biqāʿī lose his standing among the scholars in Cairo.76 Indeed, he was the one who wrote the fatwa that sealed al-Biqāʿī’s fate. Such was his standing that his gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl has survived to the present day and is available in most centres of Muslim learning. Zakariyyā solidified the trend that was The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 87 established in Mamluk realms, and was the first to write about Anwār al-tanzīl as if al-Kashshāf did not exist at all. Zakariyyā’s gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl, entitled Fatḥ al-jalīl bi-bayān khafīy Anwār al-tanzīl, was an example of a new class of work in the history of tafsīr.77 Whereas al-Suyūt ̣ī places the Anwār in the genealogical history of the reception of al-Kashshāf in his sprawling introduction, Zakariyyā treats it as a standalone work, a work that is a first entry to the Qur’an, as if it is not part of a complicated reception tradition.78 The introduction to his work bears no trace of al-Kashshāf and al-Bayḍāwī is called nās ̣ir al-dīn wa’l-milla (‘the succour of religion and the sect’) – a clear reference to his pro-Sunni credentials. The body of his gloss is, as expected, indebted to the gloss tradition of al-Kashshāf, but one is witnessing a realigning of the status of Qur’anic exegetical texts. This is not a gloss on al-Kashshāf in which Anwār al-tanzīl was used, as in al-Ṭībī. Rather, the Anwār stands here as the authoritative text, and al-Kashshāf is subordinated to it, which heralds a new phase in the history of tafsīr. By the end of the ninth/fifteenth century through to the end of Mamluk rule, Egypt had seen the introduction of Anwār al-tanzīl into scholarly circles and then into teaching circles. The most important of these developments in Cairo was the gloss of al-Suyūt ̣ī on Anwār al-tanzīl that reflected the scholarly understanding of Anwār al-tanzīl as part of the reception history of al-Kashshāf. This is why al-Suyūt ̣ī gave a history of the glosses on al-Kashshāf in his introduction, and why he saw it fit to summarise from these glosses when they had the same interpretation. This also established a scholarly tradition that would be emulated in the Ottoman realm, where al-Kashshāf continued to enjoy supremacy for most of the tenth/sixteenth century, but with clear signs that Anwār al-tanzīl was catching up and playing a more prominent role. Anwār al-tanzīl in the Ottoman Realm Susan Gunasti has recently outlined the history of Anwār al-tanzīl in the Ottoman realm and my analysis depends on her findings.79 She is one of the few scholars who has outlined the initial uptake of al-Zamaksharī’s al-Kashshāf as the central work of tafsīr by the Ottomans, mirroring the development in other parts of the Islamic world; Gunasti has also documented the gradual displacement of it by al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār.80 She is the first to offer an explanation for the rise of Anwār al-tanzīl, tying it to the rise and standardisation of the madrasa system.81 However, she rejects the theological explanation that the Muʿtazilī material of al-Kashshāf was behind its replacement, and offers other examples of what she calls ‘the flexibility of the medrese system’.82 Gunasti’s article remains a milestone in the study of Ottoman tafsīr tradition, and in the present article I have supplied the pre-Ottoman history of Anwār al-tanzīl and showed the connection of the Ottoman tradition to the developments in Cairo while also demonstrating that theological changes in Istanbul were reflective of the theological 88 Journal of Qur’anic Studies trend that had started in Cairo.83 The Sunni tradition was already moving away from al-Kashshāf; it was a slow movement that took a century or more, but the rise to ascendency of the Anwār had already started in Cairo by the ninth/fifteenth century. The madrasa system had already been established for a few centuries by then and the replacement of al-Kashshāf by Anwār al-tanzīl as the textbook for tafsīr, was, I believe, due to theological developments. I do not share Gunasti’s solution to the rise of Anwār al-tanzīl, which cannot be explained by the madrasa and its rise. But as Gunasti remarks, this replacement did not mean the disappearance of al-Kashshāf.84 What Gunasti showed in her article is how Anwār al-tanzīl became intimately tied to imperial patronage and quickly became synonymous with the Qur’an. The rise of huzur dersleri, the ‘special tefsir lessons given by leading members of the ulema in the presence of the Ottoman sultan and his invited audience during the month of Ramaḍān’, which eventually came to solely utilise Anwār al-tanzīl cemented the centrality of this text in the Islamic world.85 The classical form of this imperial tradition was formalised in 1759 and it stipulated that Anwār al-tanzīl be used exclusively for these imperial lessons. I would argue that the replacement of al-Kashshāf by Anwār al-tanzīl in the tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman madrasa, and the use of the Anwār in huzur dersleri after 1757, paved the way for the complete dominance of the Anwār in the nineteenth century. It is in the Ottoman realm that the status of Anwār al-tanzīl was solidified, and it is here that al-Kashshāf was eclipsed by it. Anwār al-tanzīl’s rise to canonical status reverberated throughout the Islamic world and resulted in its adoption as the reference textbook for tafsīr in Ottoman Cairo, Moghul India, and even Safavid Iran. Far more significant is the fact that glosses almost ceased to be written on al-Kashshāf and were now exclusively written on Anwār al-tanzīl. Glosses of the Anwār became the dominant form of tafsīr writing, and soon they came to define the genre of tafsīr. The Glosses of Anwār al-tanzīl in the Bibliographical Dictionary Kashf al-ẓunūn by Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa (d. 1067/1657) It is remarkable that although many Ottoman scholars wrote glosses on al-Zamakhsharī’s al-Kashshāf, none of these were considered worthy of being counted among the works which were studied or commemorated. Thus, for example, Ḥ ajjī Khalīfa, when he recounts the glosses on al-Kashshāf, essentially offers a summary of al-Suyūt ̣ī’s history of the glosses on al-Kashshāf as the basis for his own presentation.86 He barely mentions any Ottoman works (he does refer to two small works, but only incidentally), and al-Kashshāf seem to have already been a closed chapter by the time the Ottomans inherited it. I think that the Ottomans themselves saw the era of glosses on al-Kashshāf as over by the time they took over the tradition, because they remained loyal to the corpus they inherited from Central Asia and Cairo and saw this tradition as self-enclosed.87 The Ottomans were absolutely determined to The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 89 prove that they had mastered the tradition of al-Kashshāf and could (and did) enter into disputation with Arab scholars over the merits and demerits of al-Kashshāf, as I have shown with regards to the disputation between Qinālīzāde (d. 979/1572) and Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 984/1577). The whole Ottoman establishment celebrated this disputation and saw their representative as winning the debate.88 The situation was completely different with the glosses and the reception of Anwār al-tanzīl. Indeed, I argue that it is through their glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl that the Ottoman ulema establishment exerted its hegemony and declared its pre-eminence in the world of Islam. This can be seen by the entry in Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa’s dictionary on Anwār al-tanzīl. Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa’s entry on Anwār al-tanzīl begins with a biography of al-Bayḍāwī that brings nothing new, which is to be expected.89 He then offers an assessment of the Anwār that became standard in later works. He claimed that the Anwār was a summary of the rhetorical interpretation of al-Kashshāf that was supplemented by material on philosophy and theology from al-Rāzī’s Mafātīḥ al-ghayb (d. 604/1207), while the lexicographic material and mystical interpretations in it were drawn from the commentary of al-Rāghib al-Aṣfahānī (d. 425/1033). He also claimed that al-Bayḍāwī himself added his own brilliant insights.90 However, Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa was not a historian of tafsīr and most of his material is dependent on standard sources. For this reason, I am certain that his assessment of Anwār al-tanzīl is taken from an earlier source, a source that I have been unable to locate. Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa also cites an Ottoman scholar who wrote two lines of poetry in praise of the Anwār. This is a fundamentally significant move on the part of Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa, as it is signalling that the Anwār was a work for the Ottoman scholars to assess. The Ottoman scholar in question was Muḥammad b. Badr al-Dīn, better known as al-Munshī al-Aqḥiṣārī (d. 1001/1592),91 who was a leading scholar of tafsīr and the author of a Qur’an commentary that was gifted to the Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–1585).92 Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa then delves into a lengthy assessment of Anwār al-tanzīl but is not clear whether it is a continuation from the quotation of the line of poetry from al-Munshī or his own assessment. I am inclined to see this as an assessment by either al-Munshī or another Ottoman scholar who is yet to be identified. (Those who want to claim Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa is behind this profound assessment of the Anwār would have to prove that he was a historian of the genre of tafsīr, which I dispute). His text provides a brilliant summary of the Anwār that has two major aims: to defend it against those who still see a whiff of Muʿtazilism in the work, and to defend Anwār al-tanzīl’s incorporation of weak ḥadīths.93 As an example of the accusations against its Sunni credentials, the assessment cites al-Bayḍāwī’s commentary on Q. 40:7, in which al-Bayḍāwī offers an allegorical interpretation for the act of angels carrying the throne of God.94 The paragraph accuses anyone who would attack this interpretation of stupidity, especially since it is generally acknowledged that al-Bayḍāwī was a staunch partisan of Sunni 90 Journal of Qur’anic Studies Ashʿarism. The arguments about weak ḥadīths that extol the virtue of the Qur’an ( faḍāʾil al-suwar) in Qur’an commentaries, which as it happens are reproduced by al-Bayḍāwī in Anwār al-tanzīl, had by then become common, especially as they had already been raised by Ibn Taymiyya against al-Thaʿlabī.95 The assessment also defends al-Bayḍāwī’s citation of these faḍāʾil al-suwar traditions as a sign of his pure faith, a faith that allowed even weak ḥadīths to act as conduit of admonition. I think it is interesting that these two issues would appear this early in the reception history of Anwār al-tanzīl, and will address the significance of these two points later in the conclusion. Continuing on the reception history of Anwār al-tanzīl, Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa also notes that it had been well received by the scholarly community and was being used for teaching and glossing (dars and taḥshiya). He divides the glosses into complete glosses (full glossing of the whole work) and taʿlīqāt (commentary on selective parts of the work),96 and begins his list of the complete glosses on the Anwār with an Ottoman gloss, that of Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Quwajī (d. 951/1544), better known as Shaykh Zādeh.97 Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa declared it as the ‘most beneficial and most useful and the easiest to read’ and considered it to be the most important (aʿazz al-ḥawāshī, wa-aktharuhā qīmatan wa-iʿtibāran) of all glosses written on Anwār al-tanzīl.98 He then informs the reader that there are two versions of this gloss which have been mixed such that there was now a hybrid copy in circulation. This hybrid gloss is a massive four-volume behemoth of a work, and, as far as scholars from Safavid Iran knew, this was the most important gloss on the Anwār among the Ottomans. The second gloss that is mentioned by Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa is by another Ottoman, a certain Ibn al-Tamjīd, who would have been unknown if not for this entry.99 His gloss, by Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa’s own admission, was a summary of glosses on al-Kashshāf which, once again, highlights the entanglement of the Anwār and al-Kashshāf in the reception of Anwār al-tanzīl.100 A closer inspection of this gloss makes it clear that it was not a complete gloss but was comprised of patchy remarks on certain verses of the Anwār. The usage of this gloss indicates that the Ottomans were reaching far back into their scholastic past and rebranding earlier notes by professors on Anwār al-tanzīl as being complete glosses. This, to me, indicates a clear move on the part of the ulema to establish a pedigree such that the Ottoman scholastic tradition comes out on top. What is remarkable about this gloss list provided by Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa is that these two Ottoman authors are not only placed before the glosses of Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī but, more importantly, even before the gloss by al-Suyūt ̣ī. Thus, by the time of Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa, the Ottoman tradition had shed any sense of inferiority, and more importantly, it saw the contributions of its scholars on the gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl to be far more significant than any other works from any part of the Islamic world, especially from the Arab provinces. The list does fail to include some of the more famous works from the Ottoman Arab provinces – especially the work of Aḥmad b. Muḥammad, known as The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 91 al-Qāḍī al-Shahāb (d. 977/1069) – but this is perhaps understandable because he was a contemporary of Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa. The rest of the list is inclusive of non-Ottoman scholars, but it is not exhaustive. Coming as it is at the height of the glossing on Anwār al-tanzīl, it remains incomplete and as such is only reflective of the early period of glossing on this work. It is the nineteenth-century publication history of the glosses on the Anwār that gives us a real understanding of the hierarchy of this tradition as it was finalised and as it came to be understood by the scholastic establishment. Nineteenth-Century Glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl The nineteenth century constitutes the last phase of the flowering of Anwār al-tanzīl and the glosses on it.101 By the end of this century, things had changed so radically that Muslims themselves, at least the majority, started to reconfigure the hierarchy of tafsīr texts. By the middle of the twentieth century, Anwār al-tanzīl had been demoted and this resulted in a landscape that was so radically different that it will take archaeological work like this article to retrace the vicissitudes of the genre. With the introduction of printing in the Islamic world during the early decades of the nineteenth century, we are now able to gauge the hierarchy of the glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl by what was printed of this corpus. What I am arguing is that printing became the measure of the significance of any gloss, and as such, the decision to print a gloss of Anwār al-tanzīl reflected the rank of this gloss and was a direct response to the desire of the scholastic establishment to make it available. In this sense, the glosses of Anwār al-tanzīl straddle a transitional phase of Islamic scholastic tradition from the manuscript tradition to the use of print. (I have listed the major glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl that were published in the nineteenth century in the Appendix. These remain available and as such reflect the only access we have to this tradition beyond the manuscript copies of non-published works.) It is no surprise that one of the earliest works of the Islamic corpus to be printed in the Ottoman realms was the aforementioned gloss of Shaykh Zādeh in four massive volumes. It was actually printed twice: once in Cairo and once in Istanbul. The slew of glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl printed in the nineteenth century constitutes the core of books on the Qur’an that the scholastic establishment wanted to make available. I would argue that any work in the genre of tafsīr that was not a part of the Anwār tradition was not published by the religious establishment in the nineteenth century up to 1877. For this reason, it was an orientalist who saw to the publication of al-Zamakhsharī’s al-Kashshāf in India.102 Moreover, the publication of al-Rāzī’s Mafātīḥ al-ghayb was directed single-handedly by the great Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī as part of his Arab awakening movement.103 The publication of Abū al-Suʿūd’s Qur’an commentary fits this pattern, for he was in the Zamakhsharī–Bayḍāwī tradition.104 When Muslims finally decided to print other works of tafsīr that were not part of the Anwār al-tanzīl gloss tradition, it was because of a major cultural shift and the rise of a 92 Journal of Qur’anic Studies new hermeneutical paradigm that will have radical consequences for how the Qur’an was interpreted. Thus, the story of Anwār al-tanzīl is a fundamental story in the history of tafsīr, and it is a story that has become shrouded by the cultural transformation that happened late in the nineteenth century. Conclusion The publication in 1873 of Fatḥ al-bayān fī maqās ̣id al-Qurʾān by the Indian scholar Muḥammad Ṣ iddīq Ḥ asan Khān (d. 1890) heralded a new age in the hermeneutics of the Qur’an in the modern era.105 This now-forgotten work has an introduction that called for an activation of the hermeneutical theory of Ibn Taymiyya and raised the status of Ibn Kathīr’s Qur’an commentary.106 This was the beginning of the end for Anwār al-tanzīl and for Ashʿarī dominance in tafsīr. The reform movement started to pay attention to tafsīr and would soon dominate the hermeneutical discourse, culminating in what I have called radical hermeneutics, where the legacy of ḥadīth and the interpretations of the early three generations of Muslims were seen as the only legitimate path to the meaning of the Qur’an.107 The first edition of Fatḥ al-bayān was issued in Bhopal India in ten volumes, where it was financed by the rich author himself. When it was reissued in 1294/1877 in four volumes in a Būlāq print in Cairo, it had the Qur’an commentary of Ibn Kathīr on the margin, the first edition of this work in the modern era. The coupling of these two works points to a conscious and purposeful publishing program that was now redirecting what elements of the medieval corpus of tafsīr Muslims will read and publish. It is no coincidence that this was happening at the same time as the Arab awakening, the Nahḍa, which entailed a search for classics in every discipline including tafsīr, a search that had no place for the gloss in its academic horizon. Arab nationalists wanted al-Ṭabarī and al-Qurṭubī, and tafsīr glosses ceased to be published around this time. What we have, therefore, is a window from 1847 to 1890 when Muslims published those glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl that were considered the peaks in this genre. There was a time in scholarship when the status of Anwār al-tanzīl was clear and undisputed, especially in orientalist circles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Europe decided to print and edit a Qur’an commentary, it chose Anwār al-tanzīl; H.O. Fleischer edited the work in two volumes and published it in 1844. But one can argue that already this publication was undermining the history of the reception of the work, since it presented it without its glosses. This was radically different from how Muslims dealt with the work in the nineteenth century; when they published it, they published it accompanied by a gloss. Thus, Anwār al-tanzīl in the Islamic world always came with a gloss, although soon standalone printings would come out to reflect European practices. The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 93 There are several relevant points that I would like to highlight here: The first is that the nineteenth century history of publication was a continuation of the hegemony of the madrasa seminary in the field of Qur’anic studies. The books published then were reflective of the hierarchy of authority that was established in the madrasa system, and al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl was still paramount. All the works published during this century were thus either connected directly to Anwār al-tanzīl or in its sphere. The second point is that all publishing houses were still imperial at the beginning of the century, Būlāq in Cairo and al-Maṭbaʿa al-Maʿmūra al-Sulṭāniyya in Istanbul. All works published by these two printers were imperially sanctioned and supported. The third point I would like to make is that we are still here in the sphere of tafsīr as gloss (ḥāshiya). The revolution to come in tafsīr hierarchy has not begun yet – works by authors as such was not the thing yet.108 Anwār al-tanzīl continues to be taught in the seminaries nowadays, but this has little or no effect on the hermeneutical debates on the Qur’an in the present Islamic world. For there is now a disconnect between the madrasa curriculum and the prevalent mode of hermeneutical discourse. Salafī tafsīr, or tradition-based interpretation (in Arabic al-tafsīr bi’l-maʾthūr), has come to dominate every discourse. Its dominance is such that it has occluded the history of the tafsīr genre: the story of Anwār al-tanzīl is not only a history of one book, but of the genre and the discipline. One might want to ask if this outcome was inevitable. That is, the demotion of al-Kashshāf, and then of Anwār al-tanzīl, and the triumph of radical hermeneutics. One could see a development that was continuous in the debate about the hermeneutics of the Qur’an, which hardened and shifted to the minority view. Marginal radical hermeneutics, which was always a faint voice in the Islamic tradition, continued to gain momentum. It managed to dislodge al-Kashshāf and replace it with Anwār al-tanzīl, which ultimately did not satisfy the radical reformers, who continued to call for abandoning this mode of tafsīr and demanded the pre-eminence of the Prophetic Sunna as the carrier of God’s meaning. The equation of Anwār al-tanzīl with al-tafsīr bi’l-raʾy in modern tafsīr histories has all but guaranteed that the work is relegated to the second tier of works. We now have a new hierarchy of texts in the genre of tafsīr in which al-Kashshāf and Anwār al-tanzīl are grouped together hermeneutically and as such are both unauthoritative. This article and its sister article on al-Kashshāf uncover the untold story in tafsīr; they document the scholastic period of tafsīr that started in the seventh/thirteenth century and continued to the twelfth/nineteenth century.109 The gloss was at the heart of tafsīr during this period and unless the gloss is brought back into the narrative of our histories about tafsīr, we are telling a truncated story. The task now is to study the content and the ideas expressed in these glosses, and to write an intellectual history of tafsīr that reflects its actual historical development. 94 Journal of Qur’anic Studies Appendix: Printed Editions of Nineteenth-Century Glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl I will list here the major glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl that were published in the nineteenth century. These remain available and as such reflect the only access we have to this tradition beyond the manuscript copies of non-published works. 1. Ḥāshiyat Shaykh Zādeh. This was the most prominent gloss in the Ottoman scholastic tradition. Its prestige and significance are reflected in the ranking it gets in Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa’s dictionary, but also by the fact that it was the earliest tafsīr work to ever be published in the Middle East. It was first published in Cairo by Būlāq Press in 1847 in four massive volumes.110 Anwār al-tanzīl was published on the margins of this gloss. The same print was soon copied and published in Istanbul in 1283/1866, stating clearly that it was a reprint of the Cairo edition. In the colophon for this reprint, the Ottoman printers praise the Ottoman Sultan ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and state that it is the best gloss ever written on Anwār al-tanzīl (‘wa-hiya ajall mā kutiba wa-ʿulliqa ʿalā al-tafsīr al-madhkūr’).111 The total number of pages of this print amounts to 2,303 folio pages. However, this is not the most extensive gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl to be printed. It is also to be noted that this gloss does not have a standalone title but is simply known as ‘a gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl’. 2. Ḥāshiyat al-Qunawī ʿalā tafsīr al-Bayḍāwī by Ismāʿīl b. Muḥammad al-Qunawī (d. 1195/1781).112 This massive seven-volume work was printed in Istanbul in 1304/1868. This edition has also the gloss of Ibn al-Tamjīd on the margins. In the introduction, the author clearly states that his gloss was the result of teaching the work in the madrasa of Sultan Muhammad al-Fātiḥ in Istanbul.113 The work was reprinted recently in Beirut in 20 volumes. There is no doubt that this is one of the most extensive glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl, and indeed it is one of the most massive tafsīr works ever to be published. 3. Ḥāshiyat al-Shihāb or ʿInāyat al-Qādī wa-kifāyat al-rāḍī. This eight-volume gloss was written by one of the leading scholars of the Ottoman Arab world, Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Shihāb al-Khafājī (d. 1069/1659).114 A leading literatus and judge, he was one of the most versatile of scholars of the century. His gloss on al-Bayḍāwī became a bestseller in the Islamic world, and is ranked by Ibn ʿĀshūr as the most important gloss in the Anwār al-tanzīl tradition.115 (Ibn ʿᾹshūr endorsed this and Ḥāshiyat al-Siyālkūtī, no. 5 below, while fully neglecting any mention of the Ottoman glosses. It is not clear if nationalism was the cause of this neglect or sheer regionalism. I am inclined to see both reasons acting together to bypass the Ottoman contribution here.) This gloss was published in Cairo by the famous Būlāq Press in 1283/1866 in The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 95 eight volumes, edited and corrected by Muḥammad al-Ṣabbāgh.116 The work has been reprinted repeatedly in the same edition.117 The total number of pages is 3,165, making it second only to al-Qunawī’s gloss in sheer length. 4. Ḥāshiyat al-Kāzarūnī. This is a five-volume gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl. We have little information on this author beyond what Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa has recorded in his bibliographical dictionary.118 The name given there is: Abū al-Faḍl al-Qarashī al-Ṣiddīqī al-Khaṭīb, and he also adds that he is known as al-Kāzarūnī, and died around 945/1539. The gloss was published in Cairo in 1330/1911 and edited by Muḥammad al-Ghamrāwī.119 This makes it the last tafsīr gloss to be printed in the twentieth century. 5. Ḥāshiyat al-Siyālkūtī. This was written by a famous Indian Moghul author, whose full name was ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm b. Shams al-Dīn al-Bunjābī al-Siyālkūtī (d. 1067/1656).120 This is an incomplete gloss that was published in one volume in Istanbul in 1270/1854,121 which makes it the second printed gloss on Anwār al-tanzīl, and it is one which has remained popular in the Islamic world. As mentioned above, it was the second gloss to be championed by Ibn ʿĀshūr in his history of tafsīr.122 NOTES 1 al-Suyūt ̣ī, al-Taḥbīr, p. 331. 2 Ibn ʿĀshūr, al-Tafsīr, pp. 89–101. Citations refer to the Majmaʿ al-Buḥūth al-Islāmiyya, Cairo, edition. 3 For a study on Ibn ʿĀshūr’s conception of the history of tafsīr see my ‘Marginalia and Peripheries’. 4 Ibn ʿĀshūr, al-Tafsīr, pp. 97–99. 5 For a detailed study of these developments see my ‘Preliminary Remarks’. 6 al-Dhahabī, al-Tafsīr, pp. 282–288. 7 Rafīda, al-Naḥw, vol. 2, pp. 874–882. 8 In Western scholarship, this neglect was something that crept in after 1920, when Goldziher wrote his history, see note 6. 9 For a list of the most famous of these scholars, see my ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’. 10 See two examples, one by al-Subkī (d. 756/1355) and the other by al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480), in Saleh, ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, pp. 217 and 220 respectively. 11 On this gloss see my ‘The Ḥāshiyah of Ibn al-Munayyir’, pp. 86–90. 12 On al-Rāzī, see Jaffer, Razi. 13 See the introduction to al-Gharnāt ̣ī, al-Baḥr al-muḥīt ̣, vol. 1, pp. 32–37. 14 This understanding of the history of al-Kashshāf and Anwār al-tanzīl has seeped into secondary literature in Arabic. See for example al-Zuḥaylī, al-Qāḍī al-Bayḍāwī, p. 133. 15 See my article, ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’. See also the statistical survey carried out by Andrew Lane, which shows that the production of glosses on al-Kashshāf peaked in the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries (Lane, A Traditional Muʿtazilite Qurʾān Commentary, p. 88). 16 Ibn Taymiyya, Muqaddima, pp. 82, 86, and 90. 96 Journal of Qur’anic Studies 17 This fatwa was published at the end of Ibn Taymiyya’s Muqaddima, Cairo edn, pp. 56–58. 18 van Ess, ‘Biobibliographische’, pp. 261–262. For references on the biography of the life of al-Bayḍāwī see my encyclopaedia article ‘al-Bayḍāwī’. 19 For the debate about his year of death, see my ‘al-Bayḍāwī’. 20 al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿiyya, vol. 8, p. 157. It is not clear if this is a title or a description of the Anwār al-tanzīl. 21 See my ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, pp. 251–252. 22 al-Ṣafadī, al-Wāfī, p. 379. 23 Ibn Kathīr, al-Bidāya wa’l-nihāya, vol. 17, p. 606. 24 al-Isnawī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿiyya, vol. 1, pp. 283–284. 25 I am basing my assessment on the description provided by Rafīda, al-Naḥw, vol. 2, pp. 869–873. 26 The work has been edited by Maḥmūd al-Baṭrāwī. See also the analysis by Rafīda, al-Naḥw, vol. 2, pp. 883–890. 27 al-Nasafī, Madārik al-tanzīl, vol. 1, p. i. 28 See note 11 above. 29 I am using the Egyptian print of Anwār al-tanzīl that was edited by Muḥammad Muḥaysin et al., p. 754. 30 al-Bayḍāwī, Anwār al-tanzīl, p. 754, where he states: ‘and I ask God that He perfects its benefits to the students (tullāb).’ ̣ 31 See note 11 above. 32 al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt, vol. 10, pp. 380–381. 33 al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt, vol. 9, pp. 8–9. 34 See Saleh, ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, p. 236 n. 62. 35 Saleh, ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, p. 245 n. 3. 36 al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt, vol. 9, p. 8: ‘wa-lahu ʿalā’l-Kashshāf ḥawāsh mashūra wa-qad aqrʾahu marrāt ʿadīda.’ 37 On the main features of this pre-Zamakhsharī mode of hermeneutics, see my ‘Hermeneutics’. 38 On this work see my The Formation. 39 There are two other scholars who wrote epitomes of al-Thaʿlabī’s al-Kashf (see Saleh, The Formation, p. 206). 40 al-Khāzin, Lubāb al-taʾwīl, vol. 1, p. 4. 41 al-Ṭibī, Futūḥ al-ghayb. 42 al-Ṭibī, Futūḥ al-ghayb, vol. 1, p. 248, and vol. 17, pp. 469–471 (indexes). 43 Ibn Ḥ ajar, al-Durar al-kāmina, vol. 2, pp. 156–157. 44 al-Ṭibī, Futūḥ al-ghayb, vol. 1, pp. 609–612. 45 al-Ṭibī, Futūḥ al-ghayb, vol. 1, p. 612: ‘and I avoided being prejudiced (al-taʿaṣṣub) in my rebuttals, and only answered when there was no avoiding the clear statements of the text.’ 46 See note 13 above. 47 al-Sakhāwī, al-Jawāhir wa’l-durar. 48 Ibn Ḥ ajar, al-Kāfī al-shāf. 49 See my In Defense of the Bible, p. 81 (Arabic text). See also my ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, pp. 217–218. The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 97 50 See Saleh, In Defense of the Bible, pp. 7–20. 51 See his championing of al-Ḥirāllī in my In Defense of the Bible, pp. 17–18. 52 Saleh, In Defense of the Bible, p. 22 (and references there). 53 For the dates of the composition and completion and publication of Naẓm al-durar, see my In Defense of the Bible, pp. 21–22. 54 al-Biqāʿī, Nazm al-durar, vol. 1, p. 4. 55 See my In Defense of the Bible, p. 22. 56 The number of times al-Bayḍāwī is used in strictly exegetical matters is higher in frequency than those of al-Zamakhsharī. See the indexes in my In Defense of the Bible: p. 197 for al-Bayḍāwī, p. 199 for al-Zamakhsharī, and p. 209 for al-Kashshāf. 57 This could be a significant date on another level; this is the year al-Biqāʿī left Cairo for Damascus after his disgrace. The stage was cleared for al-Suyūt ̣ī to claim whatever he wished. For the date of the departure of al-Biqāʾī, see my In Defense of the Bible, p. 46; p. 73. 58 For a discussion of this document see my ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, pp. 229–238. 59 al-Suyūt ̣ī, ‘Muqaddimat al-Suyūt ̣ī’, pp. 692–693. 60 al-Suyūt ̣ī, ‘Muqaddimat al-Suyūt ̣ī’, pp. 693–694. 61 al-Sakhāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, vol. 2, p. 175. 62 al-Sakhāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, vol. 2, p. 176. 63 al-Sakhāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, vol. 7, p. 260. 64 al-Suyūt ̣ī, ‘Muqaddimat al-Suyūt ̣ī’, pp. 697–698. 65 Saleh, ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, pp. 229–238. 66 al-Suyūt ̣ī, al-Taḥbīr, pp. 330–331. 67 al-Suyūt ̣ī, al-Taḥbīr, p. 330. 68 For these accusations see my ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, pp. 220–229. When I published my article on the glosses of al-Kashshāf, I suggested that al-Suyūt ̣ī was the culmination of a trend started with Ibn al-Munayyir and al-Subkī and assumed that al-Suyūt ̣ī must have read the famous epistle of al-Subkī against al-Kashshāf. My suggestion was based on the fact that al-Suyūt ̣ī must have been aware of the discontent among certain Sunni scholars towards al-Kashshāf. As it turns out, al-Suyūt ̣ī does cite this epistle in this book and thus leaves no doubt that he was solidifying a trend among radical Sunni scholars who wanted to get rid of al-Kashshāf. 69 Saleh, ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, p. 330. For al-Dhahabī’s comment see his Mīzān al-iʿtidāl, vol. 4, p. 303. 70 al-Suyūt ̣ī, al-Taḥbīr, p. 331. He is echoing a statement already made by Ibn Taymiyya. For Ibn Taymiyya’s statement, see his Muqaddima (1971), p. 86. 71 al-Suyūt ̣ī, al-Itqān, vol. 6, p. 2,283. 72 al-Suyūt ̣ī, al-Taḥbīr, p. 331: ‘ʿalā annahu āya fī bayan anwāʿ al-balāgha wa’l-iʿjāz law lā mā shānuhu mimmā dhakarnāhu. Wa-fī tafsīr al-Bayḍāwī bi-ḥamd Allāh ghaniyya fī hādhā al-nawʿ’. 73 On him see Ingalls, ‘Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’. 74 For his life see al-Ghazzī, al-Kawākib, vol. 1, pp. 196–207. Certainly, one of the most extensive biographies in this three-volume biographical dictionary. 75 al-Ghazzī, al-Kawākib, vol. 1, p. 197, for his teachers. 76 al-Ghazzī, al-Kawākib, vol. 1, p. 203. See also Homerin, From Arab Poet to Muslim Saint, pp. 69–73, 121. 98 Journal of Qur’anic Studies 77 al-Anṣārī, ‘Fatḥ al-jalīl’. 78 al-Anṣārī, ‘Fatḥ al-jalīl’, fol. 2. 79 Gunasti, ‘Political Patronage’. 80 Gunasti, ‘Political Patronage’, p. 345. 81 Gunasti, ‘Political Patronage’, p. 345. 82 Gunasti, ‘Political Patronage’, p. 347. 83 Another article that appeared in the same year by Shuruq Naguib delved into the position of Abū al-Suʿūd as the leading exegete of the Ottoman realm. See her ‘Guiding the Sound Mind’. 84 ‘However, Bayḍāwī displaced Zamakhsharī only in terms of written production. As any cursory reading of later Ottoman exegetical works shows, Zamakhsharī never fell out of favor’ (Gunasti, ‘Political Patronage’, p. 345). Italics in original. 85 Gunasti, ‘Political Patronage’, p. 349. 86 See Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, vol. 1, pp. 1,475–1,484. 87 See my article ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’ especially the section on Qinālīzāde (d. 979/1572) at pp. 238–247. Indeed, Qinālīzāde is even more radical, he mentions not one Ottoman gloss on al-Kashshāf, although he himself wrote one. 88 See Saleh, ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’, for the documents and the disputation. 89 Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, vol. 1, pp. 186–194. Al-Bayḍāwī’s biography remains the most meagre among famous scholar of medieval Islam. 90 Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, vol. 1, p. 187. 91 On him see al-Muḥibbī, Khulās ̣at al-athar, vol. 3, pp. 400–401. The two lines of poetry are cited there, but not the assessment on Anwār al-tanzīl. 92 See Yerinde, ‘Münşī’, p. 22–23. 93 Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, vol. 1, pp. 187–188. The debate about these ḥadīths and their presumed ‘weakness’ (i.e. that they were fabrications) has a long pedigree. These were first admitted to the tafsīr by al-Thaʿlabī and copied by al-Zamakhsharī in his al-Kashshāf, and copied again by al-Bayḍāwī. For a discussion of these ḥadīths see my The Formation, pp. 103–108. See also Afsaruddin, ‘The Excellences’. 94 al-Bayḍāwī, Anwār al-tanzīl, p. 609. 95 The ḥadīths on the merit and virtue of each sura was a disputed issue among Muslim scholars and their presence in Qur’an commentaries had riled many a conservative ḥadīth scholar. See my The Formation, pp. 103–108, 205–221. 96 For a list of glosses on Anwār al-tanzīl see al-Fihris al-shāmil, vol. 4, pp. 1,025–1,151. See also al-Ḥabashī, Kitāb jāmiʿ al-shurūḥ, vol. 1, pp. 310–343. 97 Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, vol. 1, pp. 186–194. 98 Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, vol. 1, p. 188. 99 The issue of the gloss by Ibn al-Tamjīd remains a mystery, and needs further investigation. 100 Ḥ ājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, vol. 1, p. 188. 101 For the institutionalisation of Anwār al-tanzīl as part of the curriculum in madrasas all over the Islamic world, see Robinson, ‘Ottomans-Safavids-Muhghals’. 102 This edition was financed by the East India Company and edited by W. Nassau Lees in two volumes (Calcutta, no press, 1856). 103 The edition was published in six volumes in Būlāq in 1872. For the history of its publication see Dayeh, ‘From Tas ̣ḥīḥ to Taḥqīq’, p. 252. The Qur’an Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī 99 104 Abū al-Suʿūd’s Irshād was published in two volumes in Būlāq in 1858. 105 On him see Preckel, ‘Islamische Bildungsnetzwerke’. 106 On this work see my ‘Preliminary Remarks’, p. 33, and see also n. 47 for its publication history. 107 On this movement and its antecedents, see my ‘Preliminary Remarks’ and my ‘Ibn Taymiyya’. 108 On the rise of editorial practices and the rise of rediscovering the past in the Arab world, see now El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. 109 See Saleh, ‘The Gloss as Intellectual History’. 110 Ṣ ālḥiyya, al-Muʿjam al-shāmil, vol. 3, p. 424. 111 See Zādah, Ḥāshiya, vol. 4, p. 720. 112 On him see al-Ziriklī, al-Aʿlām, vol. 1, pp. 325–326. 113 al-Qunawī, Ḥāshiyat al-Qunawī, vol. 1, p. 3. 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