Interpreting the Qurʾān in the Islamic West (7th – 11th c.): Tradition and Transformation in Tafsīr

Abstract

While it has long been understood that the Qurʾān was central to the religious, intellectual, and cultural life of Muslims in both the medieval Islamic West and the East, the local history in the western Islamic lands of tafsīr – formal Qurʾānic exegesis – has been all but ignored by modern scholars. This dissertation illuminates the development of this genre in the Maghrib (both North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula) in the earliest period, the age prior to the Almoravids. It examines unique regional schools of thought as well as the connections of Western authors with the cities, scholars, and intellectual fashions that arose elsewhere in the Islamicate world. Far from a backwater, the exegetes of the Islamic West are shown to have intimate knowledge of scholarly developments elsewhere, although (at least in this period) that interest was not shared reciprocally. Simultaneously, the dissertation traces how novel theo-political movements – such as the Ibāḍī principality of the Rustamids that ruled from Tāhart, or the Ismāʿīlī Fāṭimids who swept across North Africa at the end of the 3rd hijrī century – produced exegetical reflections profoundly shaped by the regionally-specific interplay between ‘official’ ideology and the characteristic inertia of exegetical tradition. The dissertation concludes with the growth of a newly professionalized class of scholars and its effect on tafsīr, as new compositions were penned with the express purpose of offering students introductory ‘textbooks’ that epitomized the field’s key scriptural insights. With the collapse of Umayyad rule in al-Andalus, the rise of the Ṭāʾifah kings of the 5th/11th century, and the resulting investment in linguistic knowledge as a central facet of the sovereign’s courtly prestige, this period was marked by a melding of traditional commentary with philology that the dissertation terms “the linguistic turn.” Chapter 1 offers a critical overview of the earliest moments of Qurʾānic reflection in the Islamic West. It shows that while specific local tafsīr of this period does not survive, the social infrastructure for formal exegesis began to be developed, above all in the newly-founded metropolis and regional lodestar of Qayrawān. Chapter 2 examines the two oldest ‘Western’ mufassirs whose commentary survives, Yaḥyā b. Sallām (d. 200/815) and ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb (d. 197/813). Where the latter represents an extremely ancient exegetical style – a compilation of disparate traditions, narrated from individual masters – the former, who would become the central interpreter of the emerging Maghrib, demonstrates the transition to sequential, book-format commentary that transformed the genre. Chapters 3 and 4 cover the exegetical innovations of the 3rd-4th/9th-10th centuries in North Africa and al-Andalus, respectively. Chapter 3 pays particular attention to the effect of official theo-ideologies on tafsīr, considering the hermeneutic implications of Ibāḍī and Ismāʿīlī thought as well as the tradition of Sunnī interpretation that continued under the new Fāṭimid rulers of Qayrawān. Chapter 4 offers a series of scholarly portraits, showing the striking diversity within Andalusī commentators of this period. Even as many of their texts have been lost, the chapter reconstructs significant elements of their thought through an archeology of later sources. It then concludes with the still-extant commentary of Ibn Abī Zamanīn, whose philologically-atuned abridgment of Ibn Sallām’s tafsīr encapsulates the ‘mukhtaṣar moment’ of Andalusī exegesis. Chapter 5 takes up two North African commentators who both moved to al-Andalus in the early 5th/11th century, Makkī b. Abī Ṭālib al-Qaysī and Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Mahdawī. Both were better-known as reciters (muqriʾs), and their commentaries reflect a consistent focus on questions of scriptural language, including the place of linguistic issues in other fields such as theology or law.