Author’s Introduction المقدمة

As for the traditionists, they restricted themselves to tafsīr by report from the predecessors among the Companions and the Successors. They proceeded, and pressed on in proceeding, wherever the transmitted report led them; and they stopped where nothing had been transmitted and the meaning did not appear with a clarity needing no inquiry, taking hold of His, exalted is He, saying: “And those firmly rooted in knowledge say, ‘We believe in it; all is from our Lord’” — the verse (Āl ʿImrān 7).

They erred in that, for God — glory be to Him — did not invalidate the probative force of reason (ʿaql) in His Book. How could that be conceived, when its probative force is established only through it!

Nor did He place probative force in the statements of the Companions and the Successors, or in their views despite their gross divergence; nor did He call to sophistry by accepting contradictory and mutually incompatible statements. He urged only to reflection upon His verses, and thereby removed whatever discrepancy might appear among them; and He made it guidance, light, and a clarification of everything.

What of light, that it should seek illumination from another light! What of guidance, that it should be guided by guidance other than it! And how can that which is a clarification of everything be made clear by something other than itself!

As for the theologians, the statements of the schools, despite their divergence, called them to proceed in tafsīr upon what agrees with their schools — taking what agreed and performing taʾwīl of what conflicted — according to what the school's position allows.

And the choosing of particular schools, and the adopting of specific paths and views, though it be an effect of the divergence of scholarly views, or of something else, such as received customs and national partisanships — and this is not the place to be occupied with that — even so, this path of inquiry is worthier of being named taṭbīq, not tafsīr.

So there is a difference between the inquirer into the meaning of a verse saying: What does the Qurʾān say? — and his saying: What must we construe the verse as? For the first saying requires that every theoretical matter be forgotten at the inquiry, and that reliance be placed upon what is not theoretical; while the second requires introducing the theories into the issue, accepting them, and building the inquiry upon them. And it is known that this kind of inquiry into speech is not an inquiry into its meaning in itself.

As for the philosophers, there befell them what befell the theologians among the exegetes: falling into the morass of taṭbīq and the taʾwīl of the verses that in their apparent sense conflict with the accepted premises in the disciplines of philosophy in its more general sense — I mean mathematics, natural philosophy, the divine science, and practical wisdom — and especially the Peripatetics.

And indeed they performed taʾwīl of the verses that come concerning the realities beyond nature, the verses of creation and of the origination of the heavens and the earth, the verses of the barzakh, and the verses of the Return — to the point that they committed taʾwīl upon the verses that do not accord with the hypotheses and postulates that we find in natural science: the order of the universal and particular spheres, the arrangement of the elements, the celestial and elemental judgments, and other such things — even though they themselves had stated expressly that these views are built upon postulates neither evident nor made evident.

As for the Sufis, because of their occupation with journeying in the interior of creation, and their attention to the signs within the souls to the exclusion of the world of the outward and its signs upon the horizons, they restricted their inquiry to taʾwīl and cast aside tanzīl; and that entailed people growing bold in taʾwīl, the patching-together of poetic sentences, and inferring from everything to everything — until the matter came to the tafsīr of verses by the jummal reckoning, and the reduction of words to the zubur and the bayyināt and the luminous and the dark letters, and other such things.

And it is clear that the Qurʾān was not sent down as guidance for the Sufis in particular; nor that those addressed by it are the people of the science of numbers, awfāq, and letters; nor that its teachings are built upon the basis of the jummal reckoning, which the people of astrology devised after the science of the stars was transferred from Greek and other tongues into Arabic.

Yes, narrations have come down from the Prophet — God bless him and his House and give them peace — and the Imams of the People of the House — peace be upon them — such as their saying: “Indeed, the Qurʾān has a ẓahr and a baṭn, and its baṭn has a baṭn, up to seven abṭun, or up to seventy baṭn” — the ḥadīth.

But they — peace be upon them — gave regard to the ẓahr just as they gave regard to the baṭn, and attended to the matter of tanzīl just as they attended to the concern of taʾwīl. And we shall make clear at the beginnings of Sūrat Āl ʿImrān, God willing, that the taʾwīl by which is meant the intended sense that conflicts with the ẓāhir of the speech is among the locutions newly arisen on the tongue of the Muslims after the descent of the Qurʾān and the spread of Islam; and that what the Qurʾān intends by the word taʾwīl, in the verses in which it occurs, is not of the category of meaning and mafhūm.

And there has arisen in these times a new path in tafsīr: that a people of those who profess Islam, in the wake of their immersion in the natural sciences and their like, which are built upon sense and experiment, and the social sciences, which are built upon the experiment of statistics, inclined to the school of the sensationalists among the philosophers of Europe of earlier times, or to the school of the primacy of practice (no value belongs to apprehensions except practice's following upon them, in the measure that vital need, by the rule of compulsion, determines).

So they stated: the religious teachings cannot contradict the path that the sciences count true, which is that (no fundamentality in existence belongs to any but matter and its sensed properties). So whatever religion reports as existing, of that whose apparent sense the sciences belie — like the Throne, the Footstool, the Tablet, and the Pen — must be given taʾwīl outright;

and whatever is reported as existing, of that which the sciences do not address — like the realities of the Return — must be directed by the material laws;

and that upon which legislation (tashrīʿ) leans — revelation, the angel, Satan, prophethood, the message, imāma, and other than that — these are only spiritual matters; and the spirit is material, a kind of material property; and legislation is a special social genius that builds its laws upon sound ideas, for the end of bringing about the sound, elevated society.

They stated: the narrations, because of the admixture present in them, are not fit to be relied upon, except what agrees with the Book; and as for the Book, it is not permitted that its tafsīr be built upon the prior views and schools built upon inference by way of the intellect, which science (ʿilm) has invalidated by building upon sense and experiment; rather what is obligatory is that it stand independent in the tafsīr the Qurʾān gives, except what science has clarified.

These are the sum of what they stated, or what what-they-stated entails, of following the path of sense and experiment; and that drove them to this path of tafsīr. And we have no discussion here concerning their scientific and philosophical principles, which they took as principles and built upon them what they built. The discussion is only in this: that what they adduced against the paths of the predecessors among the exegetes — (that that is taṭbīq, and not tafsīr) — falls identically upon their own method in tafsīr, though they have declared it the true tafsīr by which the Qurʾān is interpreted by the Qurʾān. And had they not loaded anything upon the Qurʾān in obtaining the meanings of its verses, what ails them, that they take the scientific views as conceded, from which no passing beyond is permitted? So they have added no setting-right to what the predecessors corrupted.

And you, by reflection upon all these transmitted paths in tafsīr, will find that all share in a deficiency — and what a wretched deficiency: the loading of what scholarly or philosophical researches have produced, from outside, upon the purports of the verses; so tafsīr thereby turned into taṭbīq, and taṭbīq was named tafsīr; and thereby realities of the Qurʾān became metaphors, and the tanzīl of a number of verses became taʾwīlāt.

And what that entails (as we intimated in the early parts of the discourse) is that the Qurʾān, which makes itself known (as guidance for the worlds, and a manifest light, and a clarification of everything), should be guided-to by what is other than it, illumined by what is other than it, and clarified by what is other than it. So what is this other! And what is its concern! And by what does it guide to it! And what is the recourse and the refuge when there is divergence over it! And divergence there has been, and the divergence has grown fierce.

And however it be, this divergence was not begotten by divergence of view in the mafhūm of the words or the verses (the mafhūm of the single word or of the sentence according to the language and Arabic usage); for it is manifest Arabic speech, in whose understanding no Arab hesitates, nor any other who knows the language and the styles of Arabic speech. And there is not among the verses of the Qurʾān (and they are several thousand verses) a single verse locked and knotted in its mafhūm such that the mind would be bewildered in understanding its meaning — and how could there be! — for it is the most eloquent of speech, and among the conditions of eloquence is the speech's freedom from being locked and knotted; so much so that even the verses counted among the mutashābih of the Qurʾān, like the abrogated verses and others, are at the utmost clarity in respect of mafhūm; the tashābuh is only in what is intended by them, and that is evident.

The divergence — all the divergence — is only in the miṣdāq to which the verbal mafāhīm — their single and their composite — apply, and in the purport, at the level of conception and of assent.

Its elucidation: familiarity and habit (as has been said) make it so that, upon hearing the words, their material meanings — or what pertains to matter — race first to our minds; for matter is that in which our bodies, and our faculties attached to it, turn about so long as we are in the life of this world. So when we hear the words ‘life’, ‘knowledge’, ‘power’, ‘hearing’, ‘sight’, ‘speech’, ‘will’, ‘pleasure’, ‘anger’, ‘creating’, ‘commanding’, what races first to our minds from them is the material existences of their mafāhīm.

And likewise when we hear the words ‘the heaven’ and ‘the earth’, ‘the Tablet’ and ‘the Pen’, ‘the Throne’ and ‘the Footstool’, ‘the angel and his wings’, ‘Satan and his tribe and his horsemen and his footmen’, and other than that, what springs first to our understandings is their natural maṣādīq. And when we hear that God created the world and did thus, and knew thus, and willed or wills, or wished or wishes thus, we bind the act to time, construing it upon what is customary with us.

And when we hear the like of His saying: “And with Us is more” — the verse; and His saying: “We would have taken it from Our presence” — the verse; and His saying: “And what is with God is better” — the verse; and His saying: “To Him you shall be returned” — the verse: we bind the meaning of presence with place. And when we hear the like of His saying: “When We will to destroy a town, We command its affluent ones” — the verse; or His saying: “And We will to bestow favor” — the verse; or His saying: “God wills ease for you” — the verse: we understand that the whole is one same kind of will, since the matter stands so in what is with us — and upon this analogy.

And this is our way with all the words in use, and that is within our right; for what made the positing of words incumbent upon us is only the social need for making-understood and understanding; and man attached himself to society only to seek his completion by it in the acts pertaining to matter and its appendages; so we posited the words as marks for their named-things, from which we intend ends and purposes returning to us.

And it would have behooved us to take note: that the material named-things are ruled by change and alteration according to the alteration of needs along the path of transformation and completion — as the lamp: the first of it that man made was a vessel with a wick in it and some oil, the wick lit by it for seeking light in the darkness; then it did not cease being completed until today it has reached the electric lamp, and of the parts of the lamp first made — over against which the word ‘lamp’ was posited — not one single thing remains. And likewise the scale first made, and the scale made today for weighing the heaviness of heat, for instance; and the weapon taken as a weapon the first day, and the weapon made today — and so on. So the named-things have reached, in change, a point where the totality of their former parts is lost, in essence and in attribute, while the name nonetheless remains; and that is only because what is intended in naming is, of the thing, its end (ghāya) — not its shape and its form; for so long as the purpose of weighing, or of light-seeking, or of defense remains, the name of the scale and the lamp and the weapon and the rest remains as it was.

So it would have behooved us to take note that the pivot in the truth of a name is the miṣdāq's containing the end and the purpose, not the wording's freezing upon a single form — for that is a thing in which there is no prospect at all; but habit and familiarity prevented us from that. And this is what called the imitators among the people of ḥadīth, of the Ḥashwiyya and the Mujassima, to freeze upon the ẓawāhir of the verses in tafsīr; while in truth it is not a freezing upon the ẓawāhir, but a freezing upon habit and familiarity in the identification of maṣādīq.

But among these ẓawāhir themselves are matters that make plain: that leaning and relying upon familiarity and habit in understanding the meanings of the verses muddles the intents from them, and by it the matter of understanding is disordered — as in His saying, exalted is He: “There is nothing like unto Him” — the verse; and His saying: “Sights do not perceive Him, and He perceives sights, and He is the Subtle, the Aware”; and His saying: “Glory be to God above what they describe”.

And this is what called people not to confine themselves, in understanding the meanings of the verses, to the habitual understanding and the miṣdāq familiar to the mind — just as the purpose of avoiding error and attaining the unknown results was what called man to cling to the skirt of scholarly inquiry;

and that permitted inquiry to enter into the understanding of the realities of the Qurʾān and the identification of its lofty purposes; and that is in one of two ways.

The first of them: that we inquire — a scholarly or philosophical inquiry, or other than that — into a question among the questions which the verse addresses, until we stand upon the truth in the question; then we bring the verse and construe it upon it. And this is a method that theoretical inquiry approves, save that the Qurʾān does not approve it, as you have known.

And the second of them: that we interpret the Qurʾān by the Qurʾān, and seek the clarification of the meaning of the verse from its counterpart by the reflection urged in the Qurʾān itself, and identify the maṣādīq and come to know them by the properties which the verses give —

as He, exalted is He, said: “And We sent down upon you the Book as a clarification of everything” — the verse. And far be it that the Qurʾān should be a clarification of everything and not be a clarification of itself.

And He, exalted is He, said: “A guidance for the people, and clear proofs of the guidance and the criterion” — the verse. And He, exalted is He, said: “And We sent down to you a manifest light” — the verse. And how should the Qurʾān be a guidance and a clear proof and a criterion and a manifest light for the people in all that they need, yet not suffice them in their need of it — and it is the most intense of needs!

And He, exalted is He, said: “And those who strive in Us, We shall surely guide them to Our ways” — the verse. And what striving is greater than the expending of effort in understanding His Book! And what way is more guiding thereto than the Qurʾān!

And the verses to this effect are many; we shall expend the utmost capacity upon them in the inquiry into the muḥkam and the mutashābih in the early parts of Sūrat Āl ʿImrān.

Then the Prophet — God bless him and his House and give them peace — who was taught the Qurʾān and made a teacher of His Book — as He, exalted is He, says: “The Faithful Spirit came down with it upon your heart” — the verse; and He says: “And We sent down to you the Reminder, that you may make clear to the people what has been sent down to them” — the verse; and He says: “He recites to them His verses and purifies them and teaches them the Book and the wisdom” — the verse —

(and his ʿitra and the People of his House,) whom the Prophet — God bless him and his House and give them peace — installed in this station in the tradition agreed upon between the two parties: “Verily I am leaving among you the two weighty things; so long as you hold fast to them both you shall never go astray after me: the Book of God and my ʿitra, the People of my House; and that the two shall not part until they come to me at the Pond.”

And God, exalted is He, confirmed him as truthful concerning their knowledge of the Qurʾān, where He said — mighty be He as sayer: “God only wills to take away from you the defilement, People of the House, and to purify you with a purifying.” And He said: “It is indeed a noble Qurʾān, in a hidden Book; none touches it save the purified” — the verse —

and their method in teaching and tafsīr was this very method, according to what has reached us of their reports in tafsīr. And we shall adduce what is made easy for us of what has been transmitted from the Prophet — God bless him and his House and give them peace — and the Imams of the People of his House, within narrational inquiries in this book; and the tracking inquirer will not light in them upon a single instance in which aid is sought, for the tafsīr of the verse, from a theoretical rational proof or a scientific hypothesis.

And the Prophet — God bless him and his House and give them peace — has said: “So when trials become obscure to you like segments of the darkened night, then keep to the Qurʾān; for it is an intercessor granted intercession, and a denouncer counted true. Whoever puts it before him, it leads him to the Garden; and whoever puts it behind him, it drives him to the Fire. And it is the guide: it guides to the best way. And it is a book of detailing and clarification and attainment; and it is decisiveness, not jest. And it has a ẓahr and a baṭn: its ẓāhir is wisdom and its bāṭin is knowledge; its ẓāhir is graceful and its bāṭin is deep. It has stars, and upon its stars are stars; its wonders are not counted, and its marvels do not wear out. In it are the lamps of guidance and the beacon of wisdom, and a guide to the known good for him who knows equity. So let a man tend his gaze, and let his look attain the description; he will be saved from ruin and freed from entanglement. For thought is the life of the heart of the one who sees, just as the one furnished with light walks in the darknesses by the light: he extricates himself well and tarries little.”

And ʿAlī — peace be upon him — said (describing the Qurʾān, according to what is in the Nahj): “Part of it speaks by part, and part of it bears witness upon part” — the khuṭba.

This is the straight path, and the even road, which the teachers of the Qurʾān and its guides — God's blessings be upon them — traveled.

And we shall set down what is made easy for us — by the help of God, glorified is He — of discourse upon this method, in the inquiry into the noble verses, within clarifications in which we have shunned leaning upon a theoretical philosophical proof, or upon a scientific hypothesis, or upon a mystical unveiling.

And we have guarded in them against setting down anything except a literary point which the understanding of the Arabic style needs, or a premise, self-evident or practical, in which understandings do not differ.

And there has been attained, from these clarifications set down upon this method of inquiry, the full expending of discourse on what we mention:

(1) The teachings pertaining to the names of God, glorified is He, and His attributes: Life, Knowledge, Power, Hearing, Sight, Oneness, and others. And as for the Essence, you will come to see that the Qurʾān deems it needless of clarification.

(2) The teachings pertaining to His acts, exalted is He: creation, command, will, wish, guidance, leading-astray, decree, measure, compulsion, delegation, pleasure, displeasure, and so on to the other scattered acts.

(3) The teachings pertaining to the intermediaries standing between Him and man: such as the Veils, the Tablet, the Pen, the Throne, the Footstool, the Inhabited House, the heaven, the earth, the angels, the satans, the jinn, and other than that.

(4) The teachings pertaining to man before this world.

(5) The teachings pertaining to man in this world: such as knowledge of the history of his species, knowledge of himself, knowledge of the principles of his society, and knowledge of prophethood, messengership, revelation, inspiration, the Book, religion, and the sharīʿa; and of this category are the stations of the prophets, derived from their recounted stories.

(6) The teachings pertaining to man after this world — and that is the barzakh and the Return.

(7) The teachings pertaining to human character-traits; and of this category is what pertains to the stations of the awliyāʾ on the road of servanthood: islām, īmān, iḥsān, ikhbāt, ikhlāṣ, and other than that.

And as for the verses of legal rulings, we have shunned the detailing of clarification in them, for that returns to fiqh.

And this method of inquiry has yielded the lifting away of taʾwīl — in the sense of construing upon the meaning that conflicts with the ẓāhir — from among the verses; and as for taʾwīl in the meaning that the Qurʾān affirms in places among the verses, you will see that it is not of the category of meanings.

Then we have set down, at the tail of the clarifications, scattered pieces of narrational inquiries, in which we adduce what is made easy for us to adduce of the narrations transmitted from the Prophet — God bless him and his House and give them peace — and the Imams of the People of the House — God's peace be upon them all — from the channels of the ʿāmma and the khāṣṣa.

And as for the narrations coming from the exegetes among the Companions and the Successors: with the admixture and contradiction they contain, there is in them no proof against a Muslim.

And the inquirer who reflects upon the narrations transmitted from them — peace be upon them — will come to see that this new method, upon which the clarifications of this book are built, is the most ancient of the transmitted methods in tafsīr — the one its teachers — God's peace be upon them — traveled.

Then we have set down various inquiries — philosophical, scientific, historical, social, and ethical — according to what inquiry is made easy for us; and in every inquiry we have preferred to confine the discourse to the premises congeneric to it, without overstepping the mode of the inquiry.

We ask God, exalted is He, for rectitude and right guidance; for He is the best helper and guide.

The needy unto God: Muḥammad Ḥusayn al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī