Tafsir

Classical scholars of tafsir sorted their own tradition into two broad methods, and the distinction still organizes how the genre is taught. Tafsir bi-l-ma'thur, exegesis by transmission, explains a Quranic verse using material already inside the tradition: another verse of the Quran, a saying of Muhammad, or a report from a companion who had heard the verse's occasion of revelation firsthand. Al-Tabari's tenth century commentary is the model of this method at its most expansive, gathering every chain of transmission he could find for a given verse and setting them side by side, often without choosing between them, so a reader sees the range of early opinion rather than one settled answer. Tafsir bi-l-ra'y, exegesis by considered opinion, reasons instead from Arabic grammar, legal principle and theological argument once transmitted material is exhausted or silent, a method scholars across the classical schools debated the limits of rather than rejected outright, since applying the Quran's general commands to particular new cases was understood to require some exercise of reason. Ibn Kathir's fourteenth century commentary, still one of the most widely read Sunni tafsirs, narrowed al-Tabari's expansive transmission into a tighter, more doctrinally consistent selection, explicitly stating the principle that the Quran is best explained by the Quran itself, then by hadith, and only then by the companions' own testimony. Neither approach existed in pure form: a transmission-based commentator still chose which reports to include, and a rationalist exegete still worked inside inherited language and precedent. Modern reformist tafsir keeps testing how much room bi-l-ra'y should have against that inheritance.

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.