Nouman Ali Khan – Interpretive Methodology #02 Inside the Quran Library
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Right. Or I prefer to
think of tafsir as
the science of answering questions about the Quran
pertaining to its meaning.
Right. So you can ask lots of other
questions, about the Quran
and study the Quran from numerous angles, and
that's all in Ullamu Quran. Right. But when
you ask about the meaning of the Quran,
this is what we call tafsir.
This comes in 2 volumes,
gorgeous cover. You know, they say Yeah. Judge
a book by its cover, but try stop
me.
Because I saw the tights and I thought
naho
tick go to
Tick. Let's see.
Double tick.
This is fascinating.
Oh, it's it's mind blowing. It's mind I've
just read a couple of videos. I was
like You're gonna have to write down some
titles to to find.
We left off you talking about Ulum Al
Quran, and we wanted to transition over to
Ulum Tafsir.
We have quite a collection here of it.
I saw some titles that caught my eye,
but I want you to get started with
some things that you think are worthy of
mention first to get us started on the
subject. So, of course, tafsir
is itself the science of explaining the Quran.
Right? Right. Or I prefer to
think of tafsir as
the science of answering questions about the Quran
pertaining to its meaning.
Right? So you can ask lots of other
questions, about the Quran
and study the Quran from numerous angles, and
that's all in Urimu Quran. Right? But when
you ask about the meaning of the Quran,
this is what we call tafsir. Right? And
then all the things that we need in
order to do tafsir successfully,
we can call the of tafsir or the
things that underpin
the fundamentals or the
principles,
of, tafsir. And then in English,
I use the word exegesis. That's the kind
of the most common way of talking about
it. Right? And then the of tafsir can
be called hermeneutics.
So hermeneutics
is a very fancy word, and people have
different points of view about it. Right.
But but, basically, hermeneutics in in in terms
of the Western
development of the term
emerged from
the prerogative to interpret the bible. Right.
How do we understand the Bible? But then
it became, you know, how do we understand
texts in general? What is understanding
of meaning?
How does a brain work? And, you know,
it it extends in different directions.
For Muslims, when we talk about,
we are still
completely meaning in interpreting the Quran. Right? But,
of course, there's so much in that that
that can be broadened to, like, how do
you understand any text? How do you son
understand any language and communication?
So it is helpful to have this broader
perspective that the Quran is a communication. It
is words. It is speech.
It is particular and special in many ways.
Right. But there are things that are particular,
but it's interpretation. And there are other things
that just are common sense. That are just
common to all language. So, for example, things
should be understood in context.
Is this a specific rule for the Quran
or is in general? Right. And why is
it a rule for the Quran? Well, because
it is a commonsensical
thing about all understanding. Right? Any statement which
is taken out of context is in danger
of being misunderstood, By
thinking about what was said before and perhaps
what was said after Right. You have a
much, much higher chance of understanding correctly what
was intended. By thinking about where it was
said, when, to whom,
in what mood, what tone, and body language
Right. That would all affect, you know, audio.
Speech is it a part of? Yeah. Yeah.
So
Surat Tafsir, anyway, is, of course,
a science
with many dimensions to it, which we'll come
to. But
one of the aspects of that is actually
looking at what Mufasaeren
did and, you know, how they operated.
So for the most part, you know, all
these different Mufassiristan
throughout time,
they did what they did. And then people
can look at it and say, by studying
their practice, we can extract the principles they
were applying. And see which of these are
successful and which of them are questionable and
so on.
So in terms of, like, this genre of
gathering,
what has been done,
this is perhaps the most famous book. It
comes, you know, typically in 3 volumes. I've
got 3 volume 1 At the
of doctor Mohammed Hussein,
who was a in Egypt.
Mhmm. So it's a contemporary work.
Well, it's it's a 20th century work, which
by now is, you know, has is is
now out of date. I mean but at
his time was well ahead of the curve
because one of the things he did,
is,
he talked a lot about things that weren't
yet published. So he talked about them even
though they're in manuscript form. He gave an
idea about what's in them. And he did
some attempt to categorize things to give some
sense of the history and the progression of
of tafsir.
And those ideas became very influential,
but later on perhaps, you know, we we
start to see, alright. We need we need
better approaches than than what he attempted in
his book.
So among the better approaches, I mean, I've
got this very charming kind of,
there's a few books inside this one,
and one of them is
by al Fadil ibn Ashur
who's the son of the famous
So he's got a book called the
and I've got it somewhere.
So my eyes get caught by some things.
So,
is actually For those of you who don't
know the the process of interpreting and explaining
the meanings of the Quran and the people
behind it. Yeah.
Or exegesis and its men. If it's gonna
be Exegesis and its men. Yeah. If we're
gonna get literal about it. So
his book,
is perhaps more more more thoughtful,
although it's much shorter because it's not it's
not that whole work.
Then you got all sorts of different books
of.
I I pulled this out because Methodologies. That's
written by my
teacher,
doctor Abulfata
Alawari,
who was until recently the the head of
Kulid Saladin in Al Azhar. Mhmm.
And then
sometimes you get in a specific region.
So this is
the so the far west of the Islamic
world.
And sometimes The interpretations of the Quran and
the methodologies of the interpreters
specifically belonging to the far west? Yeah. So
What is that? Why is So
would include Spain.
Right. So this kind of gives you a
thematic approach because now you're gonna see what
was happening in Morocco and Spain and then
what are some of the specific trends that
that have emerged there and the connections between
those.
Interesting.
So it can be useful
to take less than a universal approach sometimes.
Yeah. Then you've got this one, which is
by the late Fadl Hasan Abbas,
scholar in Jordan. Yeah. He passed away just
a few years ago. I'm I'm sure
if if anyone wants yeah. His photograph is
on this
this collection here.
But he is looking particularly at modern tafsirs.
So there are there are actually a few
more works I've got here about modern tafsirs
and
some assessment of, you know,
from Muhammad Abdul onwards,
what are some of the trends in in
in the 20th century tafsir in particular.
So it's useful to see, you know, and
and he's a, you know, a very insightful
scholar, Fadl Hasan Abbas, this is in 3
volumes.
He gives you some insights about these tafsirs
and what's underpinning them.
And I think the last one that I
would specifically highlight in is
an unusual one.
So I'm very proud of this one
because
it's one of the books that I picked
up just because I saw the title
No.
Tick. Tick.
Double tick.
I thought, yeah. What is this? I've never
heard of this book. Yeah. So for those
of you who don't my students know, your
students would know Nahu or people that have
background Nahu is grammar. Grammar in the books
of tafsir.
Yes. Syntax and things like that. This comes
in 2 volumes.
Gorgeous cover. You know, they say Yeah. Judge
a book by its cover, but try to
stop me.
You know, that that
it's a gorgeous cover, and it comes you
know, I just thought the topic is so
enticing.
And it turned out to be a really
formative book for me because it gave a
sense of
you know that sometimes when people present the
history of, tafsir, they want to really
remove
the fact of language from the story. Right.
So the the the story that sometimes painted
is,
you know, people just they heard the meanings
from the prophet,
and then they just transmitted those meanings. So
in the beginning, what happened was tafsir.
And later on, people came and they found,
okay.
There's something more to be said, so they
started using their opinion. And using their opinion
means using language.
So
means
you know, interpreting according to opinion or educated
opinion as I like to call it. Yeah.
Sometimes goes right, sometimes goes wrong.
So they you know, so again, going back
to doctor.
This is fascinating.
Oh, it's it's mind blowing. It's mind I've
read a couple of videos. I was like
You're gonna have to write down some titles
to to Dubai. Yeah. So tafsir,
he talks about tafsir as
being either or.
It's either, like, praiseworthy Praiseworthy.
And the criterion is it's praiseworthy if you
belong to my group and it's blameworthy if
you belong to the other group.
Right?
So because he's,
Azhari,
so he exemplifies
the praiseworthy type as tafsirah of Arasi.
Right? Up there. Yeah. And the blameworthy,
tafsir of.
Now, of course, Arasi is based on and
among others. So it's hard to make these
very neat
lines between the praiseworthy and the blame worthy.
But anyway, that's why I say his theories,
they had a lot of influence, but they
need to be revised.
And this book, I think, does a lot
of that. It looks like a very academically
thorough work. So underrated.
But what I noticed that professor Waleed Salih
of Toronto,
who's one of the leaders of, you know,
tafsir studies within the Western academic context,
He actually praised this book,
not based on my recommendation, but also independently
of my, being amazed by it. So I
took that as, you know, confirmation
that I was onto something when I looked
at this. Pencil notes?
Pencil notes. Yeah.
So I asked myself questions.
I have a lot of questions in this
book because it made me think a lot.
Yeah.
But so
we're gonna talk about some of the early
works of Quran and Quran and so on.
A lot of these predate the genre of
tafsir as it emerged later on. Isn't that
fascinating?
And we're gonna dig into that because that's
a separate discussion. Yeah. And I don't wanna
undermine the Arab section Yeah. By having that
juicy discussion.
But but it just shows you that that
is that is definitely part of the story.
The linguistic,
study of the Quran has been there since
the early Since the earliest times. Yeah. That's
right. So Surat Tafsir, lots of different things
going on here. I've got things about
and order this is a whole critique, a
big chunky critique of the idea of ordering
the tafsir
according
to the,
the the time of revelation.
So putting it in chronological order. Right. It's
a critical
a criticism of that approach. Yeah. I mean,
it's really, really, really, really, really, really, really
bad according to this person to do that.
So that's
why
he had a lot of pages to to
basically say. I mean, I saw people that
have worked on that sort of thing and
try to do that for the entire.
I just think that the evidence to do
that is, you know,
if you aggregate it, it's flimsy at best.
So the famous one is,
Mohammed.
He's got a tafsir al Hadith,
and he ordered it according to chronology.
Yeah.
But, again, I think sometimes these things exist
alongside other things. And it's It can have
some benefit. The idea is, like, what what
would happen? What if we explored from this
angle
Rather than saying, okay. This is the proper
way to do tafsir. Same thing about translations
as we'll talk about translations as well. Right.
You know, sometimes a person does a kind
of strange methodology, but, yeah, I'm glad someone
tried that to see what happens. Yeah. Just
leave it at that. Yeah. Yeah.
So
the the
the field of
as such,
there haven't been that many works that have
that title
or were conceived in that way. So one
that
kind of was is even Taymiyyah's
work.
Although that is not the actual title he
gave to. That's what some editors gave it
in the 20th century.
He probably called it I could this is
a brand new edition,
done this year.
He called it
That's the title?
Yeah. It sounds like chapter 1. Yeah. So
that's that that is that is probably what
he intended to be the title.
But he often has titles like that. This
that's a short one for him, actually.
So this new edition is actually very interesting
in Oh, it's got the manuscript in it?
Well, it's got some just some pictures of
the manuscript.
But this researcher,
Sami Jadullah,
he has uncovered that probably
there's been a mistake in understanding,
which parts of this
introduction were actually written by
because
okay. This is a translation.
Typically, you find that there are 6 chapters
in.
But as it turns out,
according to this researcher, chapters 56 shouldn't be
in this work by Ibn Taymiyyah because these
were actually written by Ibn Kathir. So
Ibn Kathir is a student, of course, of
Ibn Taymiyyah.
In the first volume of,
I'm gonna do this. Hold on.
Gotta move things around a little bit. So,
there we go. In the first volume of
event
of. Right? I'm sticking with that now.
In the
right in the beginning of even tafsir's kafir,
we have got,
what has typically been thought of as the
reproduction
of chapters
4, so 5 and 6 of even the
table here.
But as he's now arguing, I think quite
well.
It's actually kind of the other way around.
What happened is that people mistakenly tact
this
introduction by onto
works.
So it it helps to keep up to
date with research.
Yeah. Right? So if you've just bought a
book, I think, well, I've done it. You
know, there's gonna be other editions. There's gonna
be new things update. New things to get
on earth. What is this?
Sorry. So, yeah, this is the issue of.
So one of the words that's used for
hermeneutics actually is. So some of these books,
like this one There's a lot that we'll
titles. Yeah. Yeah. These are actually so these
in particular are coming from, one of the
important centers for, Quranic studies.
This is in Morocco.
It's part of
and they have
Quranic study center.
They published a number of important
works,
and they have conferences around
hermeneutics.
And they're trying to expand the subject a
little bit, as I said, beyond
just the immediacy of how do we interpret
the Quran, but this the broader sense of
interpretation,
that what we can learn from how we
study the Quran as well. That's That's how
I would roughly characterize what they're doing, but
this is one that I'll admit I haven't
read.
A lot of the, this is a female
scholar,
doctor Afrida
Zumrud
or Zumrud. I'm not sure how to pronounce
her name. I'm afraid.
But,
this is a lot of what they are
doing in this Moroccan center, which is
headed by a senior scholar called.
They are looking at,
particular
subjects or
terms used in the Quran
and studying how that term
it's a kind of a
kind of thematic
which is which is something that I've got
another section on. Right.
But, also, they have got this work here
about the Quran.
Interesting.
My story with this is
that I wanted to get it before I
did my PhD thesis because my thesis was
about Qura'an. Right.
I did have
this book which is a Saudi one,
which is subtitled
Let's see, you know,
establishing the principles and evaluating works in the
Qura and the Quran.
But for a large part this book talks
about,
you know, what goes wrong in this field
and especially, you know, when the other people
do it,
when the nonorthodox
people, according to us, do that type of
tafsir?
How how does it go wrong?
So his his PhD thesis was actually entitled
Quran.
Oh. And then he sort of softened it
for the
title. And this one,
is probably closer to my
spirit and and purpose. Mhmm.
But I only got it after,
finishing.
Yeah. Because it was just
because the Quranic Study Center in Rocco doesn't
answer their emails.
I tried,
but no one could tell me how to
get it and how you know, where is
it stopped or if I could purchase it
from them, they they could send it. But,
eventually, someone found it for me and
and sent it my way.
A lot of reward then.
So it's pretty awesome.
So, yeah, it's it's pretty good.
But
I'm I'm planning to add to this
section my own book.
So
based on my PhD thesis, there'll be a
book in English called explaining the Quran through
the Quran. Right. That's coming with the University
Press.
And I'm hoping that it will get translated
into Arabic and and published,
maybe by one of these centers that we
are that we're cooperating with and
and developing a relationship with.
So, yeah, plenty of individual sections. I mean,
a few things that are important, I would
say.
This is a book by, by a scholar
who's based in London now, Yasir Matrafi.
It's called Al Aqah idea with the.
So it kind of looks at how your
or how the various,
schools of belief
affect how the Quran is interpreted.
So but it does that in a in
a in a quite
a novel and critical way.
You know, rather than just sort of assuming
as some of these books do that, well,
obviously, our group is the right one. So
let's just He's just stepping back and looking
at Well, yeah. He he treats it in
an academic way
so that one can understand how all kind
of faith commitments have some effect on how
you read. And that's that's a a key
thing in hermeneutics in general.
They have something which is called the hermeneutic
circle, which is that you are engaging with
the text and you're, you know, you're moving
between your world and the world of the
text. Right. You bring certain things to the
text. It doesn't mean that it's impossible to
to be somewhat objective.
It just means that you cannot completely deny
your subjectivity and your position Absolutely. As a
reader of the text. Absolutely. Yeah.
So, yeah, what else catches your eye over
here? I mean,
actually one did.
Come first. Yeah. Let's see the Right.
So I've got a a small section here,
which is like
critiques of modernist,
interpretations. We've got at Tayar al almani al
Hadith Right. Right next to you. But this
one is better because, right, this is talking
about sheikh
sorry. I don't really call him sheikh, but,
doctor Mohammed Shahruh
Okay.
Is the author of Al Kitab Al Quran.
Uh-huh.
So
he,
has got this book which,
you know, he's got he's got followers who
are interested in his his
interpretations of the Quran. He's not a classically
trained scholar.
He comes with controversial ideas
in in many of his books. But he's
very prolific and, you know, he appears on
TV,
you know, stations. He can be seen some
of his videos. Yeah, I'm sure. I mean,
you must have, yeah. So one of his
most famous books, this one, Al Kitab Al
Quran, because he he distinguishes between
what is meant by the Kitab and what
is meant by the Quran. I can't remember
the precise details, but I also don't want
to elaborate too much. But the point is
that
this book is, you know, putting it
That is to say in the scales.
So normally what you do is you'd put,
you know,
you'd put the book and you'd you'd carefully
analyze and
assess, you know,
Right. So the pros and cons of the
book. Where is it right now? So this
one but, you know, and the the the
the the cover designer
felt that this is not strong enough, really.
I'm gonna put the mizan through the book.
Right? So it's taken the scale,
and then it's got the sharp arrow, and
it's gone and it's cracked into the through
the cover.
So
it's not
yeah. And I think I I think I've
I've read parts of this.
Kind of became obvious what he's trying to
get at. So you know what? Sometimes books
are a bit extra,
but you can still get something from it.
Like,
you can see what's the point of the
science. Besides the rant, he has an academic
criticism of that approach.
I think the author, to be honest, is
is not also a specialist scholar. If I
remember correctly, he's a lawyer or something. So
it's like, you know,
2 guys going
blind leading the fighting the blind or something.
But in any case, there's there's a lot
of books, that that critique.
I I haven't read this one yet,
but this is among the among the things
that
are are exploring.
That wheel in general appears as hermeneutics
and then tafsir as the established
kind of
the science that has its long
history in the Islamic context. And this one
is also Moroccan author,
Utubar Raisouni.
And this was an award winning book,
in Morocco.
And in it, he he also criticizes some
western writers.
Amina Wadud is one of them.
Probably probably this it's got others like Shahru
and whatnot. Yeah. Mohammed Shahru. So sometimes what
happens is you get this kind of reactive
approach.
Nasar al Hamid Abu Zaid
is mentioned as well.
Interesting.
So,
you know, what interests me and and so
I've written one paper about this
about
well, okay. Maybe I'll maybe I'll go and
fetch that.
There's a
book by,
Abdu Sabur Shaheen.
Yeah. I think it's here. So Abdul Sabur
Shaheen
wrote a book
called Abi Adam.
And
actually, the idea that he's got here, roughly
speaking, is that
a type of evolutionary theory can be compatible
with the Quran.
Okay.
And in that, he actually followed quite closely
what Shahruh
wrote in his book,
but he denies that he took it from
Shahruh. In fact,
Abdu Subur Shahin was a far more conservative
scholar,
and he actually had televised debates with Shahruh.
So it's kind of funny that he ended
up
repeating some of his ideas.
But in this book,
you know, he he he makes his case,
and I've talked about the case that he
made. I've also talked about the responses that
he received, for example, this one by an
Azeri scholar,
Abby Adam,
and then he kind of gives a title
which responds back to,
Shaheen. But
what I what I was trying to get
at in my paper, which is called the
affair and the evolution of
pun intended as usual,
is that you can the sometimes
are being written in this reactionary
sort of mode.
So oh, you have interpreted the Quran wrong.
And then the next question should be, okay.
So how do you establish that
the the wrong principles are being followed? So
what are the actual principles? Right. So you
need to go from the reactive negative side
towards something positive. What made it wrong, and
what was the right approach? And what's the
right approach? So that's where sometimes
a lot of in our in our tradition
have emerged from,
reactions.
Yeah. So some kind of complex scenario
where then it was necessary to say, oh,
those people have got the wrong.
Right? What we need to now do is
to systematize and show what is the correct.
So the same thing can happen in in
Tafsir. The field of a soul at Tafsir
remains
in much, much need of of work and
systematization
and consolidation
and expansion
and to incorporate new things as well. And
so doing,
there's going to be some aspects of debate.
And sometimes it's helpful to show,
this example of where it's gone wrong shows
us the urgency
of of of explaining what's right and also
gives us some agenda points for what we
have to what we have to defend. Interesting.
Very interesting.
This has been fascinating. Okay. So now we
are
2 sections in. What's gonna be the next
topic of our discussion for next episode?
Well, we will we're gonna roughly proceed up,
through the library. Yeah.
So We just covered the bottom floor. We
covered the bottom floor. One thing to finish
on that is that in terms of this
development of the Surat Tafsir Yeah.
One of the projects that is
working on that as well as the Moroccan
one is the one in,
the firsir center in Riyadh. So these are
2 books that they've got in their
unit that they've set up.
One of them is.
So what they did is they studied the
situation. They looked at all the books and
not necessarily these ones, but the ones that
have got the title or sort of see
it. Right? And they said, like, what's going
on in those books? And what do they
cover? And what, what is the overlap? We're
trying to get an aggregate collection of what's
been covered. So that they can see, like,
what could what was what comes next. And
here, they did this pool of of professors
of Quran studies from across the the the
Arab and Muslim world. And Interesting. What do
you think is important? What do you think
is missing? And so I really like their
systematic approach to these things. They don't just
jump in. They
rinse the, the subject first before proceeding.
So but it shows you, and this is
one thing that I used in my thesis,
that there's
that
experts in the subject themselves agree that there's
much to do in the field of sort
of Right. That was important thing.
So inshallah, we get through Quranic language, then
we've got the,
the field of tafsir itself. We've got subject
matters,
in the Quran
and
then we've got more in the other sections
of the library. Yeah. Okay. Alright.
Inshallah, see you next episode. Assalamu
alaikum. I hope you guys are getting something
beneficial out of this. I certainly am. Thank
you.
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