Modern reformist tafsir reopened the question of how much room reasoned interpretation should have against transmitted material, and one commentary did the reopening. Muhammad Abduh, an Egyptian scholar and reformer active in the late nineteenth century, began delivering the lectures that became that commentary, and his student Rashid Rida continued and published it after Abduh's death, under the title Tafsir al-Manar, named for the reformist journal Rida edited.
The commentary argued that centuries of transmitted exegesis had buried the Quran's own ethical and social guidance under layers of grammatical hairsplitting, sectarian polemic and material the two scholars judged unreliable, and pressed for a return to reading the text for the plain sense a reasonable reader could grasp, engaged directly with the moral and practical demands of contemporary life rather than treated purely as an object of philological commentary. Abduh and Rida were willing to set aside reports and interpretive traditions they judged poorly attested even where earlier authorities like al-Tabari had recorded them without objection, treating transmission itself as something to be weighed rather than simply accepted.
Tafsir al-Manar became a founding text of twentieth century Islamic modernism, read well beyond Egypt, and the interpretive question it pressed, how much authority reasoned judgment should carry against an inherited body of transmitted material, is the same question that remains open in reformist tafsir today.