IB World Religions 5.3.3. Interpretation and Language: Tafsir and the Primacy of Arabic Notes

5.3.3. Interpretation and Language: Tafsir and the Primacy of Arabic

The work of tafsir

1. Tafsir is the science of explaining the Qur'an: what a word meant, what an ayah refers to, what ruling it carries, and how it stands with the rest of the text.
2. Muslims hold that the Qur'an is clear in its main message and still needs explanation in detail, since it often states a principle where the Prophet's practice supplies the working of it.
3. The Qur'an distinguishes muhkam ayahs, whose sense is plain, from mutashabih ayahs, whose sense is not obvious. It warns against chasing the second kind in order to stir up dispute.
4. The first interpreter in Muslim accounts is the Prophet Muhammad himself, who explained passages to his Companions. Those explanations survive as Hadith reports and remain the highest form of commentary.
5. Among the Companions, Ibn 'Abbas is remembered as the outstanding interpreter, and a great deal of early tafsir bi'l-ma'thur is transmitted in his name.
6. Tafsir grew into a library. Classical commentaries run to many volumes and move through the text ayah by ayah, gathering reports, grammar, pre-Islamic poetry and legal argument.

Transmitted and reasoned tafsir

1. Scholars divide the discipline in two. Tafsir bi'l-ma'thur explains the Qur'an from transmitted material, and tafsir bi'l-ra'y explains it by reasoned judgment.
2. Transmitted tafsir follows a fixed order of resort: the Qur'an explains itself first, then the sunnah of the Prophet, then the reports of the Companions and of the generation after them.
3. Al-Tabari, who died in 923 CE, built the great model of that method, quoting chains of reports on each ayah before weighing them. Ibn Kathir later produced a shorter version that is still widely read.
4. Reasoned tafsir works with grammar, rhetoric, theology and analogy. Al-Zamakhshari, a Mu'tazili scholar, and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi are the classic examples, and their theology visibly shapes their readings.
5. Scholars accept reasoned tafsir only under conditions. Interpretation that ignores the language, or that contradicts sound transmission, is condemned as tafsir bi'l-hawa, interpretation by mere whim.
6. Shi'ah tafsir counts the teaching of the imams as transmitted material, and modern works such as al-Mizan by al-Tabataba'i stand alongside the Sunni classics.
7. Sufi commentators look for isharat, allusions to an inner meaning, while normally accepting the plain sense rather than replacing it.

Dehlavi's rules of tafsir

1. Shah Wali Allah al-Dehlavi, who lived from 1703 to 1762 in Delhi, is a standard example of a scholar who set out how tafsir must be done. His handbook al-Fawz al-Kabir states the conditions plainly.
2. Dehlavi held that the Qur'an speaks to its first hearers in the language they already used, so an exegete must recover that usage rather than read later technical meanings back into it.
3. He grouped the Qur'an's contents into five sciences, and taught that a reader who keeps them in view will not lose the argument of a long surah.
4. He put Arabic first among the requirements: vocabulary as the Prophet's contemporaries used it, grammar, and the rhetoric that governs how the Qur'an persuades.
5. He required the transmitted material as well: the occasions of revelation, the Makkan and Madinan periods, naskh or abrogation, and the explanations reported from the Prophet and the Companions.
6. He warned against two habits in particular. One is reading the Qur'an through a doctrine already settled on other grounds, and the other is piling up unsupported stories, which had swollen earlier commentaries.
7. Dehlavi also translated the Qur'an into Persian so that Indian Muslims could follow its meaning. The criticism this drew ties the question of interpretation directly to the question of language.

Arabic as the Qur'an's language

1. Muslims hold that the Qur'an was revealed in Arabic and that its Arabic belongs to the revelation rather than carrying it. The text says of itself that it was sent down as an Arabic recitation.
2. Salah, the ritual prayer, is therefore performed in Arabic everywhere. A Muslim in Jakarta, Lagos or Bradford recites al-Fatihah in the same words as a Muslim in Makkah.
3. Recitation has a science of its own, tajwid, which governs the length of vowels, the merging of letters and the points at which a reciter may pause.
4. Trained reciters, the qurra', are honoured across the Muslim world. Recordings circulate widely, and international competitions in recitation and memorisation draw large audiences.
5. Sound carries meaning here. Muslims describe the effect of hearing the Qur'an recited as part of what the revelation does, which is why beauty of voice is taken seriously rather than treated as decoration.
6. Arabic remains the ritual language where nobody speaks it at home. Around four Muslims in five have a first language other than Arabic, and their children still learn to recite.
7. Not everything is in Arabic. Du'a, personal supplication, may be offered in any language, and the sermon is usually delivered in the local language with Arabic quotation inside it.

Translations and their status

1. Muslims translate the Qur'an constantly and still hold that a translation is not the Qur'an. The usual formula is that a translation renders the meanings and not the revelation.
2. Titles say so on the cover. Pickthall called his version The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, and Muslim editions commonly print the Arabic beside the rendering.
3. The reasoning is that the wording is Allah's own, and that no other language reproduces its grammar, its sound and the range of association each word carries.
4. A translation therefore carries no ritual status. It is not recited in salah, and the honour paid to a mushaf does not transfer to a translated copy.
5. Muslims still treat translations as valuable and necessary. Widely used English versions by Yusuf Ali, Muhammad Asad and Abdel Haleem are read, quoted and taught.
6. The question is old and still live. Dehlavi's Persian version drew objections in the eighteenth century, and a proposal to hold prayer in Turkish in the 1920s was rejected by most scholars.
7. Translations also carry interpretation. A translator has to choose one sense of an ambiguous word, so Muslims often read a translation as a form of tafsir in another language.

Recitation and interpretation today

1. Interpretation has never been open to everyone on the same terms. Classical scholars set conditions, and anyone who ignored them was said to interpret by opinion rather than by knowledge.
2. Sunni teaching gives the work to qualified ulama, scholars trained in Arabic, hadith and law, and expects other Muslims to follow a scholar's judgment on technical questions.
3. Shi'ah teaching holds the imams to be the authoritative interpreters of the Qur'an, and during the absence of the imam looks to senior living scholars for guidance.
4. Printing and then the internet changed the picture. Translations, apps and recorded lessons put the text in front of Muslims who read no Arabic and have no teacher.
5. Many scholars welcome that and warn about it at once, since a search can supply an ayah stripped of the language, the occasion and the scholarship that tafsir insisted on.
6. Modern commentary also answers new questions, and twentieth century works read the Qur'an with an eye to colonial rule, to science and to the position of women.
7. The recited Arabic remains the common ground. Whatever the disagreements over meaning, Muslims across the branches stand in prayer reciting the same text.