Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE MUSLIM SCRIPTURE t 121
Plain and Allegorical Exegesis in Islam
After Muhammad, it fell to his followers to puzzle out what the
revelation meant. Many of the developments in Islamic exegesis
are traditionally attributed to the second-generation Muslim Ibn
Abbas (d. 687), but like many other such attributions in early Islamic
history, its object may have been to confer antiquity on
something that occurred a century or more later. What we know
for certain is that most of what was done in the earliest Islamic
attempts at explaining the Quran was assimilated into the Collection
of Explanations for the Exegesis of the Quran, simply called
The Exegesis, composed in the 880s or 890s by al-Tabari, and
which from his day to this has held pride of place in Muslim exegesis.
Al-Tabari’s enormous commentary—in its original form it
had thirty parts and its early printed edition ran to fifteen volumes—proceeds
majestically through the Quran sura by sura, indeed,
word by word, combining legal, historical, and philological
explanation of great density. Each word is taken and turned over
in his hand, this way and that, and its every lexicographical and
grammatical feature noted and often explained, as already noted,
by reference to the pre-Islamic poetry of the Arabs, which was
used continuously by Muslim exegetes, somewhat in the manner
of an etymological dictionary of Arabic with which to unpack the
text of the Quran.
Since he occasionally addressed himself to the question, it appears
from Al-Tabari’s commentary that in his day there was already
understood to be another distinction in exegetical approach
that cut across the categories just discussed: that between tafsir, or
“plain” exegesis, and tawil, which is often understood as allegorical
exegesis. The distinction may go back to the Quran itself,
which, as we have seen, seems to suggest that there are two kinds
of verses in Scripture, those whose meaning is clear and those
others that require some kind of explanation. The explanations
that followed have been no more than the application of personal
reasoning (ijtihad) or some mildly critical research to the text, as
opposed to the acceptance on authority of the plain meaning—a