Unit 15 · Interpretation: Classical and Modern

Tafsir is an Arabic word that means explanation or unveiling. In Islamic scholarship it names a whole discipline: the study of what each verse of the Qur’an means, word by word and verse by verse. A scholar who writes such a work is a mufassir. A commentary is also called a tafsir, so the word names both the activity and the book. The great classical commentaries run to many volumes, because they explain all 114 surahs in order, from al-Fatiha (1) to al-Nas (114).

Muslims trace the discipline to Muhammad himself. Surah al-Nahl (16), ayah 44, says the Qur’an was sent down to the Prophet so that he might make clear to people what was sent down to them. Muslim scholars read this as the first charter of tafsir: the Prophet explained the text, and his Companions passed on what he said. One Companion, Ibn Abbas (d. c. 687), became known in tradition as the interpreter of the Qur’an, and later commentaries quote him constantly.

A second word matters here. Ta'wil also means interpretation, but in later usage it often points to a deeper or figurative sense, beyond the plain wording. Some scholars used tafsir and ta’wil as synonyms. Others, especially Sufi and Shia writers, kept ta’wil for inner meanings. Al-Tabari, as we will see, called his own book an explanation of the ta’wil of the Qur’an, so the two words were not fixed in the early period.

Why does a text need explanation at all? Scholars gave several reasons. The Qur’an uses rare Arabic words. It refers to events without naming them. It gives commands whose scope is unclear. It uses images and parables. And its readers, within a century, included many people whose first language was not Arabic. Tafsir grew to answer these needs, and by the tenth century it had become one of the central sciences of Islam.

Suppose you want to know what a rare word in the Qur’an means. You could look for a report from the Prophet or a Companion who explained it. Or you could reason it out from Arabic poetry, grammar and the rest of the Qur’an. Classical scholars gave these two roads names. Commentary built from reports is tafsir bi'l-ma'thur, explanation by what has been transmitted. Commentary built from the scholar’s own reasoning is tafsir bi'l-ra'y, explanation by opinion.

The first road was the safer one in most scholars’ eyes. A widely quoted hadith, a report of the Prophet’s words, warns that whoever speaks about the Qur’an from his own opinion should prepare his seat in the Fire. Many commentators quoted that warning in their introductions. Yet almost no one thought reports alone were enough, because reports contradict each other, cover only some verses, and need sorting by the strength of their chains of transmitters.

So the argument was really about limits. Al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir leaned on reports but weighed them and chose. Al-Zamakhshari and al-Razi reasoned freely from grammar, theology and philosophy, but still cited reports. Later writers distinguished praiseworthy opinion, grounded in Arabic and in the sciences of the text, from blameworthy opinion, which followed a scholar’s whim or his party’s doctrine. Every side accused the others of the second kind.

One early complete commentary shows the stakes. Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d. 767) wrote a tafsir that filled in names, places and details the Qur’an leaves out, often from stories that circulated among Jews and Christians, the so-called isra'iliyyat. Later scholars valued his book and also criticized it, because his reports often had no chain at all. Deciding what counts as a trustworthy source was, from the start, the central question of the discipline.

Whatever their school, classical commentators reached for the same tools. The first was Arabic itself: grammar, vocabulary and rhetoric. A commentator asked how a word was used in old poetry, which case ending a noun carried, and whether a phrase was a plain statement or a figure of speech. Al-Suyuti (d. 1505), who wrote a famous handbook of the Qur’anic sciences called al-Itqan, listed dozens of such topics that a qualified commentator had to know.

The second tool was history. Many verses respond to a particular event: a question someone asked, a battle, a dispute in Medina. The reports that describe such events are called asbab al-nuzul, the occasions of revelation, and al-Wahidi (d. 1075) collected them in a book of that name. Knowing the occasion could settle what a verse was about. It could also raise a new question: does a verse revealed for one occasion apply only to it, or to every similar case? Most scholars answered that the general wording counts, not the particular occasion.

The third tool was naskh, abrogation. Scholars held that some later verses replaced the ruling of earlier ones, as the wine verses moved from caution to prohibition. Which verses abrogated which was hotly debated, and lists ranged from a handful to hundreds. The fourth tool came from the Qur’an itself. Surah Al Imran (3), ayah 7, says that some verses are muhkam, clear and decisive, while others are mutashabih, ambiguous or open to more than one reading. It adds that those with unsteady hearts chase the ambiguous ones.

That verse became a rule for reading. Interpret the unclear in light of the clear. But where does the sentence end? Read one way, 3:7 says only God knows the meaning of the ambiguous verses. Read with a different pause, it says God and those firmly grounded in knowledge know it. Both readings are grammatically possible in the unpointed Arabic, and commentators divided over them. The toolbox, in other words, did not remove disagreement. It gave scholars a shared way to argue.

Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari was born around 839 in Tabaristan, on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, and died in Baghdad in 923. He wrote a vast history of the world and an equally vast commentary on the Qur’an, usually called Jami’ al-bayan, the comprehensive explanation. Muslim scholars across the centuries have treated it as the foundation of the whole discipline, the book later commentators quarried.

His method has two steps. For each verse or phrase, he first gathers the reports: what Ibn Abbas said, what Mujahid said, what Qatada said, each with its chain of transmitters. Where the reports agree, he says so. Where they differ, he lays out the options as numbered opinions. Then he takes the second step. He states which reading he judges best and gives his reasons, drawing on Arabic usage, the context of the surah, and the weight of the reports.

That second step matters. Al-Tabari is often called the master of transmitted tafsir, but he does not just repeat. He calls his own selections ikhtiyar, a reasoned choice, and he is willing to reject a report from a Companion if the Arabic will not bear it. Historians of the tradition point out that his book is a work of judgment as much as a work of collection. It also preserves hundreds of early opinions that would otherwise be lost.

Consider the Light Verse from the chapter story. Al-Tabari records reports that God is the guide of the people of the heavens and the earth, and reports that the lamp stands for faith in a believer’s heart or for the Qur’an itself. He then prefers the reading that God illuminates the heavens and the earth by guiding their inhabitants. A reader can disagree with him, but the reader can see exactly what the choices were. That transparency is why his book is still read.

Mahmud ibn Umar al-Zamakhshari was born in 1075 in Khwarazm, in Central Asia, and died there in 1144. He was a master of Arabic grammar and rhetoric, and he wrote his commentary, al-Kashshaf, the unveiler, during a stay in Mecca. Where al-Tabari asks who said what, al-Zamakhshari asks how the language works. Why this word and not a near synonym? Why is this clause placed first? What does the verse’s rhythm add to its sense?

This approach made the Kashshaf the standard reference for the Qur’an’s i'jaz, its inimitable eloquence, which Muslims hold to be a sign that the text is from God. Al-Zamakhshari showed, phrase by phrase, how the Qur’an’s style does its work. Later commentators of every school borrowed his observations. Even scholars who disliked his theology copied his grammar.

His theology was the problem for many. Al-Zamakhshari belonged to the Mu'tazila, a school that held that human reason can know God’s justice, that people have real free will, and that God has no body and cannot be seen. He read the Qur’an in that light. Where Surah al-Qiyama (75), ayahs 22–23, describes faces on the Last Day that are radiant, looking toward their Lord, he took the phrase to mean expecting their Lord’s reward, since in his view God cannot be seen. Sunni readers of the Ash’ari school, who held that believers will see God, rejected that reading.

The result was a book that everyone used and many warned against. Copies of the Kashshaf circulated with marginal notes correcting its Mu’tazili points, and one later scholar produced an edited version that kept the rhetoric and cut the theology. The Kashshaf shows a pattern that repeats across the tradition: a commentator’s theology shapes what a verse is allowed to mean, and rival schools read the same words in opposite ways.

Fakhr al-Din al-Razi was born in 1149 in Rayy, near modern Tehran, and died in Herat in 1210. He was trained in theology, philosophy, law and the natural sciences, and he taught and debated across Iran and Central Asia. His commentary, Mafatih al-ghayb, the keys of the unseen, is also called simply the Great Commentary. It is one of the longest ever written, and it was left unfinished at his death; students completed it.

Al-Razi’s method is the method of the debating hall. On a verse, he states a question. He lists the possible answers, often five or ten. He gives arguments for and against each. Then he decides. The questions range widely. On verses about the sky, he discusses astronomy. On verses about creation, he discusses the philosophers’ arguments about whether the world has a beginning. On the opening surah, he wrote at length about the meaning of praise and of God’s names.

A famous quip, attributed to later scholars, said that al-Razi’s book contained everything except tafsir. The joke has a point and a limit. His pages do wander far from the wording of the verse. But al-Razi thought the wandering was the point. For him the Qur’an invites reflection on nature and on reason, and a commentary should follow the invitation. Surah al-Baqara (2), ayah 164, lists the heavens, the earth, the alternation of night and day, ships, rain and winds as signs for people who use their reason. Al-Razi read verses like this as a mandate for science.

In theology al-Razi was an Ash’ari, and he defended that school against the Mu’tazila and the philosophers. Yet he took the philosophers seriously enough to state their views fairly before answering them, which made his book a reference even for readers who disagreed with him. Historians of Islamic thought describe him as the figure who brought philosophy fully inside the commentary tradition, where it stayed.

Ismail ibn Umar ibn Kathir was born around 1300 near Bosra in Syria and died in Damascus in 1373. He was a historian and a hadith scholar, and a student of Ibn Taymiyya, the Damascus jurist who argued that Muslims should return to the practice of the first generations. Ibn Kathir’s commentary, Tafsir al-Qur’an al-azim, put that program to work on the text.

His introduction lays out a ladder. The best tafsir explains the Qur’an by the Qur’an, since what one verse states briefly another explains at length. If that fails, turn to the Sunna, the Prophet’s example as recorded in hadith. If that fails, turn to the Companions, who saw the revelation come down. Only then, and with caution, turn to the next generation. Opinion for its own sake is not on the ladder. Ibn Kathir also warned against the isra’iliyyat, though he still quoted some.

Take the Throne Verse, Surah al-Baqara (2), ayah 255, which begins, in Pickthall’s translation, Allah! There is no God save Him, the Alive, the Eternal. Ibn Kathir explains its phrases by other verses about God’s knowledge and power, then cites a hadith in which Muhammad tells the Companion Ubayy ibn Ka’b that this is the greatest verse in the Book of God. He adds reports about reciting it for protection. The verse, the hadith and the Companions’ practice are stacked one on the other.

Ibn Kathir’s book was respected in its own age, but its fame grew in the twentieth century. Because it is shorter than al-Tabari’s, clearer in structure, and cautious about theology and stories, it became the tafsir most often printed, abridged and translated, including into English. Scholars note that this modern popularity says as much about the readers who chose it, and their preference for hadith-based method, as about the medieval book itself.

Shia Muslims hold that leadership of the community after Muhammad belonged to Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, and to a line of descendants known as the Imams. For Twelver Shia, the largest Shia group, there were twelve. This belief shapes tafsir. Shia scholars hold that the Imams inherited the Prophet’s knowledge of the Qur’an’s meaning, so reports from the Imams carry a weight in Shia commentary that reports from Companions carry in Sunni commentary.

The most widely used classical Shia commentary is Majma’ al-bayan, the gathering of explanation, by al-Fadl ibn al-Hasan al-Tabrisi, who died in 1153 or 1154 in Iran. Historians describe it as remarkably balanced. Al-Tabrisi organizes each passage under headings: the variant readings, the grammar, the occasion of revelation, the meaning. He quotes Sunni authorities freely, including al-Tabari, and then adds the readings passed down from the Imams. Sunni scholars have long cited it in turn.

Where the two traditions differ most is on verses they read as referring to Ali and the Prophet’s household. Surah al-Ahzab (33), ayah 33, speaks of God’s wish to remove impurity from the people of the house, the ahl al-bayt. Shia commentators, citing reports from the Imams, read the people of the house as Ali, Fatima, Hasan and Husayn, and see the verse as a statement of their purity and authority. Many Sunni commentators, citing the surrounding verses addressed to the Prophet’s wives, include the wives in the phrase. Both sides cite hadith; they weigh them differently.

Some early Shia writers also held that the Qur’an as collected had been altered to remove references to Ali. Al-Tabrisi rejected that view firmly, and mainstream Twelver scholarship since has affirmed that the standard text is complete. Historians note the point because it shows that Shia and Sunni commentators, whatever their disputes over meaning, came to share the same text and most of the same tools.

Sufism is the name for Islam’s traditions of inward devotion: remembrance of God, discipline of the self, love and closeness. Sufi commentators did not reject the plain meaning of the Qur’an. They held that beneath the outer sense, the zahir, lay an inner sense, the batin, that spoke to the soul’s journey. A verse about Musa (Moses) crossing the sea could also be read as the soul crossing from fear to trust. Sufis pointed to Surah Qaf (50), ayah 16, which says God is nearer to a person than the jugular vein, as a charter for this closeness.

Abu’l-Qasim al-Qushayri of Nishapur, who died in 1072, wrote a commentary called Lata’if al-isharat, the subtleties of the allusions. The title tells the method. Each verse contains an allusion, an ishara, that the trained heart can catch. Al-Qushayri was also a jurist and a theologian, and he was careful to say the inner reading adds to the outer and never cancels it. Many Sufi commentators quoted a hadith that every verse has an outer and an inner meaning, though scholars of hadith rated it weakly.

Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi, born in Murcia in Spain in 1165 and buried in Damascus in 1240, went further. In works like the Fusus al-hikam, the bezels of wisdom, he read the prophets of the Qur’an as facets of a single divine wisdom, and he treated the whole world as a book of signs mirroring the Qur’an. His readers called him the greatest master. His critics, including Ibn Taymiyya, said he had dissolved the line between God and creation. A long commentary printed under his name is now known by scholars to be the work of a later follower, Abd al-Razzaq al-Kashani (d. c. 1330).

Sunni jurists set limits on Sufi reading. An inner meaning was acceptable, most held, if it did not contradict the outer meaning, the Arabic or the law, and if the reader did not claim that his reading was the only one. Within those limits Sufi tafsir flourished for centuries and shaped poetry from Rumi in Persian to Yunus Emre in Turkish. The tradition shows a fourth way of asking what a verse means: not who reported it, how it is phrased, or what reason says, but what it does to the one who reads it.

Return now to the Light Verse, Surah al-Nur (24), ayah 35. In Pickthall’s rendering, God is the light of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of that light is a niche holding a lamp, the lamp in a glass, the glass like a shining star, lit from a blessed olive tree neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil would almost glow without fire being touched to it; light upon light; God guides to that light whom God wills; and God speaks to people in parables. The verse ends by saying God knows all things. Four kinds of commentator, four kinds of reading.

Al-Tabari lists the reports. Some say the niche is the believer’s chest and the lamp is the Qur’an in the believer’s heart. Some say the lamp is faith. Some read the whole figure as the light of Muhammad. He prefers the reading that God, as light, guides the inhabitants of the heavens and the earth. Al-Zamakhshari, the rhetorician, explains each image as part of a single extended simile and asks why the tree is neither eastern nor western. His answer is that such an olive gets sun all day and gives the purest oil, so the image is about the highest clarity.

Al-Razi asks what light is. He argues that light in the literal sense is a quality of bodies, so God cannot be light literally; the verse must mean that God is the source of all illumination and guidance. He discusses the physics of oil, flame and glass, and he lists opinions on whether the parable describes the Qur’an, the Prophet or the believer. A Sufi reader takes another path. Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), who was both a jurist and a Sufi, devoted a whole treatise to this verse, the Niche of Lights, in which the lamp, glass and tree map the levels of the human spirit rising toward God.

None of the four denies the others’ readings. Al-Tabari records inner readings among his reports. Al-Razi cites the philosophers and the Sufis. Al-Ghazali quotes the grammarians. The tradition gave scholars permission to disagree, within limits, because it held that the text has depth. Historians of tafsir put it this way: the classical commentary is not a single answer but a recorded conversation, and each new commentator joined it by quoting the ones before.

For a thousand years the Qur’an was copied by hand and taught by voice. That changed slowly. Muslim scholars long resisted printing the Qur’an, partly out of respect for the text and partly from distrust of the presses, which were run by Europeans. Muslim-run presses began in the nineteenth century, including the Bulaq press near Cairo, founded in the 1820s. In 1924 the Egyptian government issued a carefully edited printed Qur’an, based on the reading of Hafs from Asim, and that edition became the standard text across most of the Muslim world.

Print did more than multiply copies. It let a commentary reach readers who had never sat with a teacher, and it let a journal carry a verse-by-verse explanation to subscribers in Cairo, Bombay and Java in the same month. A reader with a printed Qur’an, a printed tafsir and a dictionary could form opinions without a master’s permission. Historians of modern Islam describe this as a shift in authority, from the scholar’s chain of teachers to the printed page and the individual reader.

The second force was colonialism. By 1900, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Russia ruled most Muslim lands. Their schools taught science, law and history in European terms. Christian missionaries printed criticisms of the Qur’an. Muslim reformers responded with commentaries that took up the new questions directly: Is the Qur’an compatible with modern science? Does it permit constitutional government, women’s education, interest-bearing loans? The classical commentators had not asked these questions because no one had put them.

So the modern commentary looks different from a classical one. It is often shorter on grammar and longer on themes. It speaks to the general reader, not the trained scholar. It argues with Europeans as well as with earlier Muslims. And it is more likely to be written in Urdu, Turkish, Malay or English than in Arabic. Every commentator in this chapter worked inside these conditions, whether he or she embraced them or fought them.

Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) grew up in the Egyptian countryside, studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, was exiled for a time after a failed revolt against British influence, and returned to become the Grand Mufti of Egypt in 1899. He believed that Islam, rightly understood, agreed with reason and could guide a modern society. Late in life he gave public lectures on the Qur’an at al-Azhar, verse by verse, to audiences that included students, officials and journalists.

One listener was Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), a Syrian who had moved to Cairo and founded a journal called al-Manar, the lighthouse, in 1898. Rida printed Abduh’s lectures in the journal, with his own additions, and after Abduh’s death he continued the commentary himself. The result, known as Tafsir al-Manar, reached Surah Yusuf (12) and stopped at Rida’s death in 1935. It is a modern commentary in the fullest sense: composed for print, serialized in a magazine, and addressed to the reading public.

The method has several marks. Abduh insisted that the Qur’an is a book of guidance, hidaya, not a textbook of grammar or law, so a commentary should show what a passage means for living. He read the Qur’an by the Qur’an, treated many isra’iliyyat as unreliable, and preferred to explain miracles in ways he thought reason could accept. He also criticized taqlid, blind following of earlier authorities, and called for ijtihad, fresh reasoning from the sources. Rida shared this program but grew more cautious and more attached to hadith over time.

Historians call Abduh and Rida the founders of modernist tafsir, and nearly every later reformer answered them. Conservative scholars accused them of bending the text to please Europeans. Later liberals said they had not gone far enough. Both criticisms show their influence. The questions al-Manar raised, about reason, reform and the reader’s own responsibility, are the questions the rest of this chapter follows.

Two of the most widely read commentaries of the twentieth century came not from professional scholars but from activists. Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) was an Egyptian teacher and literary critic who joined the Muslim Brotherhood after a stay in the United States around 1949. Abul A’la Maududi (1903–1979) was a journalist in British India who founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 and later worked in Pakistan. Both wrote for ordinary readers, and both read the Qur’an as a call to build a society governed by God’s law.

Qutb’s Fi zilal al-Qur’an, In the Shade of the Qur’an, was written largely in prison, where the Egyptian government held him for most of the years between 1954 and his execution in 1966. It is a commentary of feeling and of argument rather than of grammar. Qutb read the Meccan surahs as a struggle between faith and jahiliyya, a word that classically means the age of ignorance before Islam. He applied it to his own society, arguing that a state that does not rule by God’s law is in a new jahiliyya. The idea that judgment belongs to God alone, which he drew from verses such as Surah Yusuf (12), ayah 40, became his political principle.

Maududi’s Tafhim al-Qur’an, Toward Understanding the Qur’an, was written in Urdu between 1942 and 1972. It is calmer in tone and more systematic, with long introductions to each surah and many notes on law. Maududi held that the Qur’an sets out a complete system for personal, social and political life, and he coined the phrase Islamic state to describe its goal. His commentary was translated into English and many other languages and became a standard text for Islamist movements in South Asia and beyond.

Both men have been read in opposite ways. Some Muslims treasure their commentaries for their clarity and moral urgency. Many Muslim scholars reject their political readings, arguing that the classical tradition never applied jahiliyya to Muslim societies or made the state the goal of the text. Historians note that the two commentaries show how a reading of the Qur’an, printed and widely sold, could become a political program, for better or worse, in the age of the nation-state.

Fazlur Rahman (1919–1988) was born in what is now Pakistan, studied at Oxford, and led Pakistan’s Central Institute of Islamic Research in the 1960s. Opposition to his views drove him abroad, and in 1969 he joined the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death. His students there included many of the scholars who shaped Qur’anic studies in American universities. His books, especially Islam and Modernity (1982) and Major Themes of the Qur’an (1980), set out a method he called the double movement.

The first movement goes from the present back to the seventh century. A reader takes a Qur’anic ruling and studies the situation it addressed in Arabia: the customs, the problems, the reasons the verse gives. From that study the reader draws out the principle, the moral aim the ruling served. The second movement returns to the present. The reader asks what that principle requires in today’s conditions, which may differ from Arabia’s. The ruling’s letter belongs to its time; its aim, Rahman argued, is what binds.

His favorite example concerned polygamy. Surah al-Nisa (4), ayah 3, permits marriage to up to four women but adds that if a man fears he cannot deal justly, he should marry only one. Ayah 129 of the same surah says men will never be able to deal equally between wives, however much they wish. Rahman read the permission as a concession to a society with many war orphans and widows, and the justice clause as the principle. In modern conditions, he concluded, the principle points toward monogamy. Critics replied that he was letting the reader decide which verses are principle and which are concession.

Rahman also argued that the classical scholars had treated the Qur’an as a list of separate rulings rather than a unified message with an ethical center. That charge was not new, but his method for answering it, with its explicit two-step, became one of the most discussed proposals in modern Muslim thought. Scholars in Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa and the United States adapted it, and the Chicago connection makes him a figure worth knowing for readers in Illinois.

Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) was born in Sialkot in the Punjab, studied philosophy in Cambridge and Munich, practiced law in Lahore, and became the most celebrated Urdu and Persian poet of his age. In 1930 he also gave the presidential address to the All-India Muslim League in which he proposed a separate Muslim state in northwest India, an idea later linked to the founding of Pakistan. But Iqbal is in this chapter for his reading of the Qur’an.

In a series of lectures published as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930, expanded 1934), Iqbal argued that the Qur’an’s spirit is dynamic, not static. He pointed to its constant appeal to nature and history as signs, and to verses such as Surah al-Ra’d (13), ayah 11, which says God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. For Iqbal this was the Qur’an’s principle of movement. He believed Muslims had frozen their law and thought, and he called for a new ijtihad using modern knowledge.

Iqbal’s reading of the Qur’an drew on the Sufi tradition, especially Rumi, and on European philosophers such as Bergson and Nietzsche. He read the story of Adam’s fall not as a disaster but as the birth of free choice and self-awareness, a step up rather than a step down. He saw in the Qur’an a picture of the human being as God’s partner in an unfinished creation. Theologians of the classical schools did not always recognize their Qur’an in his.

Iqbal did not write a verse-by-verse commentary, and he was a poet rather than a trained mufassir. Yet his lectures shaped how educated South Asian Muslims, and later many others, thought about the text. Fazlur Rahman took up his call for a new ijtihad; Islamists borrowed his praise of action; Sufis claimed his love of Rumi. His verse is recited at gatherings across Pakistan and India, and lines of it are quoted in the Qur’an classes of Chicago’s South Asian mosques.

Women have taught the Qur’an since the first generation. Muslim tradition names Aisha, the Prophet’s wife, as a leading source of hadith and interpretation, and the biographies of scholars list many women who taught men. But the great written commentaries were all by men, and the law schools were built by men. In the late twentieth century, women trained in universities began to write commentary of their own and to ask what difference that made.

Amina Wadud, an American convert, published Qur’an and Woman in Malaysia in 1992. Her method borrows from Fazlur Rahman. She reads each verse about women in its context, asks what principle it served, and then reads it against the Qur’an’s overall picture of humanity, which she argues is one of equal moral agents created from a single soul, as Surah al-Nisa (4), ayah 1, says. Asma Barlas, in Believing Women in Islam (2002), argued further that a God the Qur’an describes as just cannot be read as endorsing injustice, so any reading that subordinates women must be a misreading.

The hardest test case is Surah al-Nisa (4), ayah 34. It describes men as maintainers or protectors of women, ties this to what men spend, and gives a sequence of steps for a husband who fears rebellion from his wife, the last of which uses the verb daraba, most often translated to strike. Classical commentators read the verse as permitting a light blow and limited it heavily. Wadud reads the verse as describing, not commanding, a seventh-century arrangement, and as restricting an existing practice. Some modern translators render daraba as to separate from or to go away from, a reading most classical grammarians did not adopt. Wadud has said that she ultimately refuses the verse’s plain sense as a moral guide, a position that other Muslim women scholars, including those who defend the classical readings, have criticized.

These debates go on in universities, in mosques and online, in English, Arabic, Indonesian and Persian. Some Muslim women scholars argue instead from within the classical law schools, finding room for women there. Others reject the whole project as importing Western ideas. Historians of the field note that what is new is not women reading the Qur’an, which is old, but women publishing commentaries under their own names and being answered as commentators.

Open a website or a pamphlet on Islam and science and you may find a list: the Qur’an on the expanding universe, on the water cycle, on the stages of the embryo, on the barrier between two seas. This approach is called tafsir ilmi, scientific exegesis. Its claim is that the Qur’an mentions facts no seventh-century person could have known, and that this proves its divine origin. The approach is old in seed, since al-Ghazali and al-Razi both held that the Qur’an contains all knowledge in principle, but it grew large in the twentieth century.

The Egyptian scholar Tantawi Jawhari (d. 1940) wrote a multi-volume commentary filled with diagrams, plant lists and scientific tables, arguing that Muslims had neglected the hundreds of verses about nature. In 1976 a French physician, Maurice Bucaille, published a book arguing that the Qur’an, unlike the Bible, contained no statement at odds with modern science. Bucaille’s book was translated widely and is still handed out. Verses such as Surah al-Anbiya (21), ayah 30, which says the heavens and the earth were one piece and God split them apart and made every living thing from water, are quoted as forecasts of cosmology and biology.

The critics are mostly Muslims. The Egyptian scholar Amin al-Khuli (d. 1966) argued that the Qur’an spoke to its first audience in the language and science of their day, and that reading modern theories into it distorts both the text and the science. Others note the risk: if a verse is tied to today’s theory, what happens when the theory changes? Scientists who are Muslims have pointed out that the verses are read after the discovery, never before it, so they predict nothing. The classical commentators, they add, read 21:30 as a statement about God’s creative power, not as astronomy.

A middle position is common in mosques and classrooms. On this view the Qur’an invites study of nature, as 2:164 and many other verses say, and a believer may see harmony between faith and science without claiming the text contains equations. The debate is worth knowing because it shows how a modern pressure, the prestige of science, produced a new way of reading, and how the tradition’s own tools, context and the plain sense, were used to push back.

Most Muslims hold that the Qur’an is the Qur’an only in Arabic. A version in another language is a translation of the meanings, useful for understanding but not the text itself, and it is not used for ritual prayer. This view goes back to the classical scholars and their doctrine of i’jaz, the text’s inimitable eloquence. It explains why English versions carry titles like The Meaning of the Glorious Koran or The Koran Interpreted, and why a printed translation almost always has the Arabic beside it.

The English history begins with outsiders. George Sale, an English lawyer, published a translation in 1734 with a long introduction; it was read by Voltaire and Jefferson and shaped European views for a century. J. M. Rodwell (1861) rearranged the surahs into what he thought was their order of revelation. E. H. Palmer (1880), a Cambridge scholar of Arabic, aimed at plain, sometimes rough, English. All three were Christians writing for non-Muslim readers, and Muslims noted the distance in their tone.

Marmaduke Pickthall, an English novelist who became a Muslim, published The Meaning of the Glorious Koran in 1930 with the approval of scholars at al-Azhar. His stately, King James-style English is the version this course quotes. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, an Indian civil servant, followed in 1934 with a translation in verse-like lines and thousands of notes; it became the most widely distributed English Qur’an of the twentieth century. A. J. Arberry, a British scholar, tried in 1955 to carry the sound and rhythm of the Arabic into English. Since then Muslim translators such as Muhammad Asad (1980) and M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (2004) have written in modern prose, and The Study Quran (2015) added a commentary drawn from the classical tradition.

Each translator made choices. Should Allah be rendered as God? Pickthall kept Allah; Abdel Haleem writes God. Should the difficult verb in 4:34 be to strike, to beat lightly, or something else? Should the reader see the surahs in the traditional order or Rodwell’s? Should the notes lean Sunni, Shia, modernist or Sufi? Comparing two translations of one verse is one of the best ways to see how interpretation works, because every translation is already a reading.

A student in Chicago today can open a phone, tap a verse, hear it recited by a dozen reciters, see six translations side by side, read al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir in English, and look up the grammar of every word. Twenty years ago that would have taken a research library and a knowledge of Arabic. Sites and apps that offer the text with translations and audio, and a word-by-word grammatical corpus built at a British university, are now the everyday tools of study for millions.

Historians of religion see three effects. First, access: people who could never read a classical commentary now can, in their own language. Second, comparison: seeing translations side by side shows readers that translation is interpretation, a lesson that once took years of study. Third, a flattening of authority: a video by a popular preacher and a page from al-Razi appear on the same screen with equal weight. The reader must decide what to trust, which is exactly the problem the classical scholars built their chains of transmission to solve.

The internet also revived old debates in new forms. Disputes over a verse now unfold in comment threads across continents. Scientific exegesis spreads by short videos. So do rebuttals. Groups that reject the whole hadith tradition, and read the Qur’an alone, have found an audience online that they never had in print. So have traditional scholars who post lectures on the classical texts. Scholars of Islam in America note that many young Muslims now first meet tafsir on a screen rather than in a mosque.

None of this changed the text. The Arabic on the screen is the 1924 Cairo edition, and the recitations follow the same rules of tajwid that a tenth-century reciter used. What changed is the room the text sits in: bigger, noisier, and open to anyone. That is the modern version of the question this unit began with. Who interprets, and by what method, and how does a reader tell good interpretation from bad?

Estimates vary, but surveys by the Pew Research Center put the number of Muslims in the United States at about 3.5 million in 2017, a little over one percent of the population, and growing. No single origin dominates. Roughly a fifth of American Muslims are Black Americans, many of whose families entered Islam in the twentieth century; large groups trace their roots to South Asia, the Arab world, Iran, Africa and Southeast Asia; and a share are converts. Most are Sunni, a smaller share Shia, and many decline any label. That diversity means American Muslims bring nearly every reading tradition in this unit to the same text.

Chicago’s part of the story is old. At the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893 alongside the World’s Columbian Exposition, an American convert named Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb spoke about Islam to a mostly Christian audience, one of the first public presentations of the religion by a Muslim in the United States. In the twentieth century, Chicago became a center of Black American Islam, and the city and its suburbs now hold dozens of mosques serving Arab, South Asian, Bosnian, Turkish, African and American-born congregations, along with Islamic schools and a college of Islamic studies.

How do these communities read? A Friday sermon in a South Asian mosque may quote Maududi; an Arab mosque may quote Ibn Kathir; a Sufi gathering may read al-Qushayri; a university study group may argue about Fazlur Rahman or Amina Wadud. Weekend Qur’an schools teach children to recite with tajwid, and some produce huffaz, students who have memorized the whole text, by the age of twelve. Public-school students study the Qur’an in world history and, as here, in courses on religious texts, using the same tools scholars use.

Surveys of American Muslims find that most say the Qur’an should be read with attention to its context and that there is more than one true way to interpret Islam, though a large minority holds that it should be read literally. What almost all share is the sense, expressed by the Qur’an in Surah al-Baqara (2), ayah 2, that the book is a guidance for those who are mindful, and the conviction that the Arabic, recited, is where the text lives. A student in Illinois who has followed this unit can now hear that recitation, read the classical debates, and understand why the same verse sounds different in different rooms.