Insight Editions · No. 106
An Anthology of Qur'anic Commentaries, Volume I
On the Nature of the Divine
Feras Hamza, Sajjad Rizvi, and Farhana Mayer (eds.)
This anthology presents Muslim commentaries on six Qur’anic verses concerning divine nature, comparing interpretations across theological, philosophical, legal, and mystical traditions.
A study guide to An Anthology of Qur'anic Commentaries, Volume I by Feras Hamza, Sajjad Rizvi, and Farhana Mayer (eds.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
The book translates what some twenty Muslim commentators said about six verses on God.
Argument Map
Figure 1. Argument map of the anthology: an introduction on method, six verses grouped by theme, and the debates that recur across them [p 1 to 11].
What the book is
Diagrams mark mechanisms already in the chapters.
Chapter Map
Follow the part order. Jump by theme only after one full pass.
What the Book Is
The anthology does not argue one thesis about God. It sets commentators side by side, verse by verse, so that the reader can watch a shared form of commentary produce very different conclusions [p 1, 7 to 8]. The voices run across thirteen centuries, from Muqatil b. Sulayman (d. 150/767) to the modern Lebanese scholar Fadl Allah. They include Sunni traditionists, Mu'tazili and Ash'ari theologians, Twelver, Isma'ili and Zaydi Shi'is, an Ibadi, philosophers and Sufis [p 7, 21]. Each chapter opens with the editors' introduction to the verse, followed by translated extracts in roughly chronological order [p 8].
The six verses were chosen for three reasons: their place in devotion, their bearing on the Abrahamic conversation about God, and their use in arguments among Muslims themselves [p 9]. Together they cover God's relation to space, His sovereignty and knowledge, His mercy, His light, His decree and His oneness [p 9 to 11].
At a Glance
Chapter Map
| Unit in the book | Printed pages | Verse and theme | Main question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Introduction and commentators | 1 to 66 | The craft of tafsir | How do reports, reason and inspiration combine in one genre? |
| Chapter 1 | 67 to 126 | Q. 2:115, the face of God | Is this a rule about the prayer direction or a claim about God and space? |
| Chapter 2 | 127 to 298 | Q. 2:255, throne and seat | What is the seat, and who may intercede? |
| Chapter 3 | 299 to 346 | Q. 6:12, mercy inscribed | How can mercy be binding on God? |
| Chapter 4 | 347 to 454 | Q. 24:35, the light verse | What does the lamp stand for, and how literal is "God is the Light"? |
| Chapter 5 | 455 to 490 | Q. 54:49, the measure | Does "everything by measure" mean predestination? |
| Chapter 6 | 491 to 576 | Q. 112, oneness | What kind of "One" is God? |
| This guide's synthesis | whole book | Takeaways, frameworks, Who's Who | What carries over to the reader's own work? |
Table 1. Chapter map of the anthology and of this guide.
Part One. The Craft of Commentary
Before the six verses, the editors give two orientation chapters: an introduction to tafsir as a discipline, and a portrait gallery of the twenty works they translate [p 1 to 52]. This part condenses both. Read it as the key to everything that follows, because each later chapter is a conversation among exactly these voices.
How Tafsir Began
Commentary started as practical work. The first Muslims needed to apply scripture to ritual and law, and popular storytellers (qussas) fed a hunger for more detail about prophets and angels, so narrative exegesis grew alongside legal exegesis [p 1 to 2]. While the Prophet lived he was the final arbiter of meaning; after him the Companions took on the task, among them Ibn 'Abbas (d. 68/687), Ibn Mas'ud (d. 32/652), Ubayy b. Ka'b (d. 42/662) and 'Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 40/660) [p 2].
The editors place the likely starting point of exegesis as a scholarly discipline in the next generation, the Successors. Names such as Mujahid (d. 104/722), Qatada (d. 118/736), al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110/728) and Sa'id b. Jubayr (d. 95/714) become standard authorities in Sunni works, while Muhammad al-Baqir (d. 117/735 or earlier) and Ja'far al-Sadiq (d. 148/765) anchor the Twelver and Isma'ili works [p 2]. Written commentaries existed by the early second/eighth century at the latest, and the earliest one in this volume, that of Muqatil b. Sulayman (d. 150/767), belongs to exactly that period [p 2].
| Stage | What happened | Example in this volume |
|---|---|---|
| Prophetic era | The Prophet as living arbiter of meaning | Reports cited by all |
| Companions | Explication by those closest to revelation | Ibn 'Abbas, Ibn Mas'ud, 'Ali |
| Successors (2nd/8th c.) | Exegesis as a discipline; first written works | Muqatil (paraphrase inside the text) |
| Philological works | Lexis, etymology, syntax | Farra' and Abu 'Ubayda, used by Tabari |
| Classical form (4th/10th c.) | Exhaustive rehearsal of reports plus the author's judgement | Tabari |
| Variations within the form | One interest dominates: law, theology, grammar, mysticism | Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Abu Hayyan, Kashani |
| Modern | Reform, action, existential relevance | Manar, Mawdudi, Fadl Allah |
Table 2. The development of tafsir as the editors sketch it [p 1 to 4, 47 to 52].
Two habits run through the genre. Some authors comment on almost every verse (Muqatil, Tabari, Abu Hayyan); others are selective (Hud, the early Shi'i works, Kashani), choosing verses that let them voice their own school [p 3 to 4]. Either way, the commentator rehearses earlier authorities and then adds his own voice by preferring one opinion or adding another [p 4]. Classical form is usually dated to Tabari (d. 310/923), whom the editors call arguably the first classical commentator; later giants such as Qurtubi on law or Fakhr al-Din al-Razi on Ash'ari theology and Avicennan philosophy are variations within that form, not exceptions to it [p 4].
Tafsir and Ta'wil
The word tafsir comes from the root f-s-r, with the basic sense of explanation; it appears only once in the Qur'an (Q. 25:33). Ta'wil appears far more often, and the Qur'an itself draws no clear line between them [p 5]. The quarrel over that line became a quarrel about the right way to read.
Muqatil's introduction reports Ibn 'Abbas dividing the Qur'an into four aspects: an explanation scholars can know, an Arabic the Arabs know, a licit and illicit that no one may ignore, and a ta'wil known only to God, which Ibn 'Abbas glosses as what will come to pass [p 5]. The editors read this as an attempt by traditionalists to fence ta'wil off as knowledge of the unseen, which in turn shows that other, more opinion-based readings were already in play [p 5].
That inner meaning had its proof-texts. A hadith attributed to Ibn Mas'ud gives the text four aspects: an apparent sense (zahir), an inner sense (batin), a limit (hadd) and a look-out point (muttala') [p 6 to 7]. A saying of Ja'far al-Sadiq, cited in the notes, assigns four layers to four readers: the literal expression for the common folk, the allusion for the elite, the subtleties for the friends of God, and the realities for the prophets [p 18].
Figure 10. Four layers, four readers, as cited from Ja'far al-Sadiq in the notes to the introduction [p 18].
The editors draw a sharp conclusion in the same notes: Sunni ta'wil is mostly tafsir, while Shi'i and Sufi tafsir, at the points that matter most to them, is really ta'wil [p 18]. Shi'is use it to find the imam in scripture; Sufis use it to align mystical experience with a hidden reality in the text. The labels bi'l-ma'thur (by tradition) and bi'l-ra'y (by opinion) are therefore descriptions of procedures, not boxes: almost every commentary uses both, and the labels were more often weapons of praise or blame [p 5 to 6, 17].
| Approach | Basis | Typical user here | Risk its critics saw |
|---|---|---|---|
| By tradition (ma'thur) | Reports from Prophet, Companions, Successors or imams | Tabari, Qummi, 'Ayyashi, Furat, Hud | Weak or partisan chains |
| By opinion (ra'y) | Grammar, theology, philosophy | Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Zamakhshari, Abu Hayyan | Reading one's school into the text |
| Allusive (ishari) | Inspiration, unveiling, the inner self | Maybudi, Kashani, Burusawi | Untestable claims |
| Isma'ili ta'wil | The imam as living interpreter | Ja'far b. Mansur, Abu Hatim al-Razi | Authority sealed from outsiders |
| Modern reformist | Reason, social norms, action | Manar, Mawdudi, Fadl Allah | Text bent to a programme |
Table 3. Editor's synthesis of the hermeneutic families represented [p 5 to 7, 21 to 52]. The last column summarises objections the book reports, not new ones.
Design of the Anthology
The volume draws on seventeen tafsirs, two Isma'ili ta'wil works and one Zaydi compilation, spanning thirteen centuries from the second/eighth to the fourteenth/twentieth, and representing Sunnis, Twelver, Isma'ili and Zaydi Shi'is, and Ibadis, with Ash'ari, Mu'tazili, philosophical and Sufi colourings [p 7]. Each chapter takes one verse, opens with a contextual introduction, and then lets the commentators speak in chronological order [p 8].
The theme of the first volume is God. Verses were picked by three criteria: devotional importance, the place of Islam within the Abrahamic traditions, and a role in intra-Muslim argument [p 9].
| Ch. | Verse | Theme | Why it was chosen |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Q. 2:115 | God's omnipresence and the qibla | The qibla unites all schools as people of the qibla (ahl al-qibla) |
| 2 | Q. 2:255 | Throne and seat | Divine attributes, early theological disputes, devotional use |
| 3 | Q. 6:12 | Incumbent mercy | Mercy set against threat; status of sinners |
| 4 | Q. 24:35 | Light | The most famous simile of God; light as guidance |
| 5 | Q. 54:49 | Measure | Free will against predestination |
| 6 | Q. 112 | Oneness | The minimum belief shared by every Muslim |
Table 4. The six verses and the editors' reasons [p 9 to 11].
On Q. 6:12 the editors flag a rare formula: God has inscribed mercy upon His self (nafs), a word that also means essence, and the Qur'an uses it this way only with mercy, repeating it once at Q. 6:54 [p 10].
The commentators were not chosen as "the best". Tabari, Tabrisi and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi were obvious; others were picked to avoid repetition and to widen the range of styles. Fadl Allah was preferred over Tabataba'i, whose approach can largely be reconstructed from Qummi, Tabrisi and Burusawi, while Fadl Allah's cannot be [p 11]. The editors admit there are arguments against including Alusi and Mawdudi [p 11].
The two Isma'ili works do not look like ordinary tafsir, and the editors explain why. For Isma'ilis the literal text is indispensable but symbolic of an inner truth accessed and taught only by the imam, the speaking Qur'an as against the silent text between the covers [p 11 to 12]. Abu Hatim al-Razi stands for Persian Qarmatism and Ja'far b. Mansur for Fatimid Isma'ilism; Sharafi's compilation stands in for an early Zaydi tradition with few surviving tafsirs [p 12].
Commentary is also a dating tool. Because ideas reappear from one work to the next, the genre lets a historian chart theology over time: Muqatil against Tabari on the Sunni side, or the early Shi'i trio of Qummi, 'Ayyashi and Furat against the later Tabrisi and Tusi [p 14].
The Twenty Voices
The editors' second orientation chapter profiles each author [p 21 to 52]. The table groups them; short portraits follow for the figures who matter most in later chapters.
| Commentator (death as printed) | Tradition | Work and method |
|---|---|---|
| Muqatil b. Sulayman (d. 150/767) | Early Sunni, Murji'i in theology | Paraphrase; Biblical narratives; literal on anthropomorphism |
| Hud b. Muhakkam al-Hawwari (fl. 4th/10th c.) | Ibadi (Berber, North Africa) | Abridges Yahya b. Sallam, adds that faith needs works |
| 'Ali b. Ibrahim al-Qummi (fl. 4th/10th c.) | Twelver Shi'i | Possibly earliest full Shi'i tafsir; weighs reports |
| Furat b. Furat al-Kufi (fl. late 3rd/9th c.) | Shi'i | Lists reports on walaya; miracles of imams |
| al-'Ayyashi (fl. late 3rd/9th c.) | Twelver Shi'i | Imams' reports only; extant to Sura 18 |
| al-Tabari (d. 310/923) | Sunni | Reports, philology, readings, own verdict |
| Abu Hatim al-Razi (d. 322/934-5) | Isma'ili (Qarmati) | Kitab al-Zina, a lexicon of religious terms |
| Ja'far b. Mansur al-Yaman (d. ante 346/957) | Fatimid Isma'ili | Kitab al-Kashf, ta'wil of the da'wa |
| Maybudi (fl. 6th/12th c.) | Sunni Sufi, Persian | Kashf al-asrar, three "turns"; mystical turn used here |
| al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1144) | Mu'tazili | Kashshaf; grammar and rhetoric |
| al-Tabrisi (d. 548/1154) | Twelver, Mu'tazili-leaning | Majma' al-bayan: language, syntax, meaning |
| Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606/1209) | Ash'ari philosopher | Mafatih al-ghayb: issues, arguments, counter-arguments |
| 'Abd al-Razzaq al-Kashani (d. 736/1336) | Sufi of Ibn 'Arabi's school, likely Twelver | Ta'wilat: cosmos read as the self |
| Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati (d. 745/1344) | Sunni grammarian | al-Bahr al-muhit: words, context, readings |
| al-Sharafi (d. 1062/1651) | Zaydi | Compiles six Zaydi imams |
| Burusawi (d. 1137/1725) | Ottoman Sufi (Jilvati) | Ruh al-bayan; Persian poetry, Ibn 'Arabi |
| al-Alusi (d. 1270/1854) | Hanafi, Ash'ari, Naqshbandi | Ruh al-ma'ani: tradition, reason, Sufi reading |
| 'Abduh (d. 1323/1905) and Rida (d. 1354/1935) | Sunni reformist | al-Manar: reason, reform, divine norms |
| Mawdudi (d. 1399/1979) | Islamist, Subcontinent | Tafhim al-Qur'an: understanding for action |
| Fadl Allah (b. 1935) | Twelver, Lebanon | Existential and ecumenical commentary |
Table 5. The twenty works [p 21 to 52]. Dates exactly as printed in the book.
The early voices
Muqatil is probably the earliest extant commentary, and scholars trust it more than other early texts because its traits are consistent: generous use of Biblical narratives, literal readings of God's hand, eye and throne, and a conviction that every Muslim will finally leave Hell by affirming God's oneness. Those traits make him a Murji'i traditionist; claims that he was a Zaydi are, the editors say, unconvincing [p 22]. Later Sunni traditionists rarely named him, put off by his disregard for chains and his literalism, yet his material kept circulating [p 22].
Hud wrote for the Ibadis of North Africa, descendants of the Kharijis in a far milder form. His commentary abridges the Murji'i tafsir of Yahya b. Sallam but corrects it at the decisive point: faith alone does not make a true believer, works are required for salvation [p 23 to 24].
The three early Shi'i works differ in temperament. Qummi weighs reports and admits non-Shi'i material; the printed edition seems censored of early anti-Companion passages [p 25]. Furat simply lists reports, many on loyalty to the imams and dissociation from their enemies, including miracle accounts that spread doctrines later called extreme [p 26]. 'Ayyashi, a convert from Sunnism, uses the imams' reports against four targets: literal anthropomorphism, denial of the prophets' impeccability, doubts about the integrity of the 'Uthmanic text, and claims of cosmic power for the imams. To him, the editors note, extremism within Shi'ism was a bigger threat than Sunni error [p 27].
Tabari, the reference point
Born in Amul in 224/839, Tabari travelled to Rayy, Baghdad, Basra and Kufa for hadith; he reached Baghdad hoping to study with Ahmad b. Hanbal, who died first [p 28]. He founded a short-lived legal school and, by his own recollection, knew the Qur'an by heart at seven [p 28]. His tafsir matters most as the fullest surviving collection of early exegetical citations, many from works now lost. It works in three layers: assessment of reports, philology drawing on Abu 'Ubayda and Farra', and variant readings, with his own verdict marked by the phrase "Abu Ja'far says" [p 29].
The Isma'ili pair
Abu Hatim al-Razi was the Isma'ili missionary in Rayy who debated the physician-philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi; his Kitab al-Zina is a lexicon of theological terms that cites Ja'far al-Sadiq and Ibn 'Abbas alike, perhaps for a general audience [p 29 to 30]. Ja'far b. Mansur fled massacre in Yemen to the Fatimids and rose so high that his house stood nearest the caliph-imam's palace [p 30 to 31]. His Kitab al-Kashf reads scripture as the story of the da'wa and its hierarchy, a hermeneutic the editors call interpretation embedded in counter-history, with the imam as the pole of meaning [p 31].
Mystics: Maybudi, Kashani, Burusawi
Maybudi began his Persian Kashf al-asrar in 520/1126, building on the lost commentary of Khwaja 'Abd Allah Ansari. He was a traditionalist who condemned kalam and philosophy, accepted God's hand and throne without interpretation at the exoteric level, and then let inspiration run free at the esoteric level [p 32 to 33]. His commentary moves in three "turns": a Persian rendering, an exoteric commentary, and a mystical commentary full of anecdotes, poems and intimate prayers. The anthology translates the third turn [p 33 to 34].
Kashani wrote the commentary long printed under Ibn 'Arabi's name; there is, the editors state, no extant tafsir by Ibn 'Arabi [p 38]. His method is tatbiq, applying every cosmic reference in the Qur'an to the human microcosm, on the premise of three realities: God, the macrocosm and the microcosm [p 39].
Burusawi, born in 1063/1652 and initiated into the Jilvati order in Istanbul, wrote over a hundred works and the Arabic Sufi commentary Ruh al-bayan, saturated with Ibn 'Arabi and Persian poetry and drawing meaning even from particles and letters [p 45 to 46].
Theologians and grammarians
Zamakhshari is the great Mu'tazili, whose five principles (divine unity, justice, promise and threat, the intermediate position of the grave sinner, commanding right and forbidding wrong) surface in his readings of verses like Q. 2:255 and Q. 24:35 [p 35]. Tabrisi gives the Twelver tradition its most admired commentary, reducing each verse to language, syntax and meaning [p 36 to 37]. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, an Ash'ari and a critic of Avicenna, built the largest commentary of his age out of issues, arguments and counter-arguments; in his last illness he wrote a creed and seemed to disown his years of philosophy [p 37 to 38]. Abu Hayyan was such a grammarian that, as scholars noted, an entire Arabic grammar could be reconstructed from his commentary; he derides Zamakhshari while quoting him at length, and seems to have disliked Sufis even more than Mu'tazilis [p 40 to 41].
The Zaydi compilation by Sharafi gathers six imams. The most important for this volume is al-Qasim al-Rassi (d. 246/860), who keeps the Qur'an's anthropomorphic wording but reads it figuratively: "in the heavens" means "with", the divine self is self-reference, God is not light as we experience it, and His oneness is uniqueness, not a number [p 43 to 44].
The moderns
Alusi, mufti of Baghdad, combined tradition, Ash'ari reason and Sufi reading, but over fifteen years of writing he leaned more on Ibn Taymiyya and less on Sufism, a shift the editors call a growing "Salafisation" [p 47 to 48]. The Manar commentary of 'Abduh and Rida holds that text and reality cannot truly conflict: an apparent clash means our reading of one or the other is wrong. Its two key ideas are God-designed cosmic norms and social norms [p 50]. Mawdudi read the Qur'an as a programme for action [p 51], and Fadl Allah as an existential and noticeably ecumenical word for a divided Lebanon [p 52].
Chapter 1. Seeking the Face of God (Q. 2:115)
And to God belong the east and the west; so whithersoever you turn, there is the face of God; God is indeed All-embracing All-knowing. Fifteen commentators, from Muqatil to Fadl Allah, read this verse [p 67 to 125]. Their readings drift over thirteen centuries from a question of ritual law (which way do I face when I cannot find Mecca?) to a question of theology (can God be in a place at all?). This chapter traces that drift.
Three Features of One Verse
The editors break the verse into three phrases, each opening a different debate [p 67 to 70].
| Phrase | Question it raises | Typical answers |
|---|---|---|
| To God belong the east and the west | What is God's relation to space? | Ownership, as a creator owns his creation; east and west stand for all directions |
| Whithersoever you turn, there is the face of God | What is God's "face"? | His qibla; God Himself; His pleasure; His essence; an attribute whose manner is unknown |
| All-embracing, All-knowing | Why these two names together? | God is present through His knowledge; or ample in mercy and legal latitude |
Table 6. The three features of Q. 2:115 [p 67 to 70].
Two words carry most of the weight. The verb walla means both to turn towards and to turn away from, so the phrase covers every possible orientation of a person [p 67 to 68]. The noun wajh means face, but also direction, aspect, core and essence. Put the two together and the verse can say: wherever you turn, you meet the direction, the aspect, even the essence of God [p 68 to 69]. The editors add a striking observation. Since the face reveals who a person is, a cosmos full of God's face becomes a kind of revelation, and the Qur'an's word for verses (ayat) is also its word for the signs in creation, so creation reads as a book of signs [p 68 to 69].
The third feature hides a careful hedge. Most commentators say God is everywhere through His knowledge, but they stop short of calling presence and knowledge inseparable, because that would seem to place God in space. In practice, the editors note, "God is All-embracing" is often read as "God's knowledge is all-encompassing" [p 70].
The Early Voices: A Ruling for Travellers
Muqatil: a story of a lost dawn prayer
Muqatil tells the verse as an anecdote. A group of believers travelling on a cloudy day could not find the qibla at dawn; some prayed east, some west. This was before the qibla moved from Jerusalem to the Ka'ba. When the sun rose they saw their mistake, told the Prophet in Medina, and the verse came down [p 72 to 73]. Muqatil glosses "the face of God" simply as "there is God", reads All-embracing as the dispensation to abandon the qibla when its direction is unknown, and All-knowing as God's awareness of what they had intended. He closes by citing Q. 2:177: piety is not turning one's face east or west [p 73].
The editors read this as salvation history in miniature. The community is called simply "a group of believers", not yet "Companions", and is portrayed as indulged by a merciful God who responds to its needs through the Prophet [p 72]. The footnote's point is worth keeping: the outward direction of prayer is not what defines piety; inner belief is [p 73].
Hud: the Ibadi emphasis on belief and works
Hud gathers several occasion stories: the sixteen months of praying towards Jerusalem after the emigration, the change to the Ka'ba by Q. 2:144, a night journey where a traveller marked a prayer space with pebbles and woke to find it misaligned, and a report from Ibn 'Abbas of a cloudy day [p 74 to 75]. Most of his narrations come from Basran circles around al-Hasan al-Basri, who is reported to have said such a prayer is valid. A reported ruling adds that a worshipper who discovers the error mid-prayer simply turns for the remaining units [p 75 to 76].
His Ibadi identity shows quietly: praying in the wrong direction when the true one cannot be known is no grave sin that puts a person outside the community, and what counts is turning to God with right belief, since faith for the Ibadis must be joined to works [p 74].
Qummi and 'Ayyashi: the Shi'i line on obligatory prayer
The early Shi'i commentators draw a sharp legal boundary. Qummi says the verse came down about supererogatory prayer, which may be prayed in any direction while travelling; obligatory prayer may be offered only towards the qibla [p 76]. 'Ayyashi backs the same rule with words of the imams. Al-Baqir reports the Prophet praying on his camel in whatever direction it walked, on the way to Khaybar and back from Mecca with the Ka'ba behind him. Al-Sadiq tells Zurara to dismount for obligatory prayer unless in danger, and adds that Noah prayed upright on the Ark facing the hidden qibla because Gabriel set him towards it [p 77 to 78].
| Commentator | Occasion stressed | Who gets latitude? |
|---|---|---|
| Muqatil | Travellers lost at dawn | Anyone who cannot find the qibla |
| Hud | Qibla change; travellers at night | The sincere believer in honest error |
| Qummi, 'Ayyashi | Prayer while riding | Supererogatory prayer only |
| Tabari | Many; refuses to choose an occasion | Travel, battle, voluntary and prescribed prayer |
| Razi | Ranks the options | Only the mounted voluntary worshipper and the lost traveller |
| Fadl Allah | Not tied to prayer | All turning to God, except where proof requires a direction |
Table 7. How far the verse's latitude extends, by commentator [p 72 to 125].
Tabari: Sovereignty First, Occasions Second
Tabari opens with his own view: east and west belong to God as possession and creation, as one says a house belongs to its owner [p 79]. He anticipates an objection. Does God own only one east and one west? No: the sun rises from a different point each day of the year, so the phrase covers everything between the farthest risings and settings, and God's dominion has no boundary [p 79].
He then lays out the competing occasions, each with its chains of transmission [p 79 to 84]:
- The Jews objected when the Muslims turned from Jerusalem to the Ka'ba, and God replied that all easts and wests are His. Ibn 'Abbas calls the qibla the first thing abrogated in the Qur'an.
- The verse came first, allowing prayer in any direction, and was later abrogated by the command to face the Sacred Mosque (Qatada).
- It permits voluntary prayer on a riding animal (Ibn 'Umar).
- It absolves people who prayed in the wrong direction on a dark night ('Amir b. Rabi'a; al-Nakha'i).
- It concerns the Negus of Abyssinia, a Christian ruler who had sheltered the early Muslims. When the Prophet asked the community to pray for him at his death, some objected that he had not prayed towards the qibla; the verse answered that whoever turns towards any direction seeking God will find Him there.
- It answers the question "towards where?" after God promised to answer supplication (Mujahid).
His verdict is characteristic. God singles out east and west to remind His servants that they are owned, and Tabari argues that obedience follows from being owned. One should be content with that information and not dig into the reports about its cause [p 84]. On abrogation he is a strict jurist: a verse can abrogate or be abrogated only when it nullifies an established rule and admits no other meaning. Since this verse can carry several meanings (travel, battle, any kind of prayer, supplication), no one may declare it abrogated without a compelling proof [p 85 to 86]. He links it to the previous verse: even if Christians barred people from the mosque in Jerusalem, believers may remember God anywhere on His earth [p 87].
On the face, Tabari records four views without forcing a choice: God's qibla; God Himself; His pleasure; and the face as an attribute of One who has a face [p 87].
Grammar and Transcendence: Zamakhshari and Tabrisi
Zamakhshari, the Mu'tazili, reads "face" as metaphor: it is God's direction, the one He ordained and is pleased with [p 88]. The lesson he draws is that if you are kept from the mosque in Mecca or Jerusalem, the whole earth has been made a place of prayer. All-embracing means ample in mercy, wishing to ease things for His servants, and the editors' note links this to the Mu'tazili conviction that a just God acts in His creatures' interest while they remain responsible for their choices [p 88 to 89]. He also records al-Hasan's variant reading tawallu, meaning "in whichever direction you assign the qibla" [p 89].
Tabrisi, the Twelver, gives the first fully structured analysis in the volume, under five headings [p 89 to 93]:
| Heading | What Tabrisi does |
|---|---|
| Language | Roots of east (rising) and west (absence, distance, a sword's edge); wasi' as All-sufficient and ample |
| Syntax | The lam of possession; singular nouns used generically; the conditional built on ayna; why thamma points to a known, distant place |
| Occasions | Jewish objection (with al-Jubba'i: God is not in one direction, as the corporealists claim); free choice later abrogated; voluntary prayer on animals (from the imams); Jabir's lost raiding party |
| Meaning | Face as qibla, as God knowing and seeing, as His satisfaction; All-embracing as All-sufficient or ample in mercy and legal dispensation |
| Arrangement | Links the verse to Q. 2:114: the destroyers of mosques cannot stop you remembering God |
Table 8. Tabrisi's five-part method on Q. 2:115 [p 89 to 93].
Razi: The Verse as a Proof Against Corporealism
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi organises his comment as numbered issues [p 94 to 103]. On the occasion, he prefers the prayer reading because it is transmitted from Companions and Successors and fits the plain sense of "turn your faces". He lists seven variants, including Abu Muslim's view that Jews and Christians each claimed Paradise while imagining their God located in a place (Jerusalem's Rock, the east of Jesus' birth); anything that inheres in a place is a creature, not the Creator [p 95].
He then narrows the latitude. "Whithersoever you turn" implies choice, and choice exists in only two cases: voluntary prayer on a riding animal, and the traveller who cannot determine the direction [p 97]. A father's analogy makes the point. If a father gives his son a set of tasks and says "whichever way you act, you will please me", he means within the tasks he set, not absolute freedom. So too here an ellipsis is implied: whithersoever you turn among the directions you were commanded [p 97 to 98].
The fourth issue is the theological heart. Razi calls the verse one of the strongest proofs against corporealism, for two reasons [p 100 to 101]:
Figure 22. Razi's two-pronged argument from Q. 2:115 against a corporeal God [p 100 to 101].
Opponents argued that a face implies a body and that "embracing" is a property of bodies. Razi answers that interpretation is unavoidable, and offers four readings of "face": an annexation of honour, like "God's house" or "God's she-camel"; purpose and intention; God's satisfaction, as one approaches a person from the front to seek his favour; and the thing itself [p 101 to 102]. All-embracing cannot mean "in knowledge", or All-knowing would be redundant; so it means ample in power, giving and mercy. All-knowing then works almost as a warning to the careless worshipper [p 102 to 103].
The editors note what makes this distinctively Razi: he does not simply repeat the Ash'ari formula of accepting attributes without asking how. He asks in what sense God encompasses and knows, and his answer that God knows each thing in its particularity reads as a quiet critique of the philosophers' claim that God knows particulars only in a universal way [p 94].
Abu Hayyan: The Grammarian's Impatience
Abu Hayyan surveys the occasions, finds them contradictory, and tells commentators to transmit only the sound ones; he faults al-Wahidi for a book of occasions in which little is sound [p 105 to 106]. He takes a similar swipe at a commentator who filled his tafsir with legal cases that belong to fiqh [p 108]. His own anchor is context: the verse answers the previous one about those who block worship in mosques, so worship is not limited to a mosque [p 106 to 107].
On the face he is blunt. Some people, on the strength of transmitted reports, make the face an extra fixed attribute of God; Abu Hayyan reports that Abu'l-'Aliya and others thought this weak, since it affirms an attribute unequivocally through an equivocal word [p 109]. The term must be read in a sense Arabic allows and that fits God, or as metaphor, and metaphor in Arabic, he says, is more plentiful "than the sands of Yabrin" [p 109]. Clinging to the literal word is ignorance of the language, and he prays not to be like the Karramiyya, who ascribed bodily parts to God [p 109]. The choice to face any direction shows God is in no direction or space [p 110]. He closes with a stylistic note: the verse repeats the noun "God" rather than using a pronoun, which gives the final sentence independence and grandeur [p 111].
The Sufi Readings: A Cosmos That Is All Face
Kashani: the inward east and west
Kashani applies the method of correspondence (tatbiq) from the school of Ibn 'Arabi. The east is the world of light and manifestation, the Christians' paradise and prayer direction, and in reality God's inner aspect; the west is the world of darkness and concealment, the Jews' paradise and direction, and in reality His outer aspect [p 103]. Wherever one turns, outwardly or inwardly, the face of God is His essence disclosed through all His attributes [p 104].
A second reading moves the verse into the heart. To God belongs the "rising" in hearts when He discloses His beauty in the state of witnessing and annihilation, and the "setting" when He veils Himself through His majesty in the state of subsistence after annihilation. In whichever direction you turn, no thing exists except Him [p 104]. Farhana Mayer's notes, quoted by the editors, offer images for this: a lamp lit in a glass vessel until the vessel becomes only a passage for the light, and wood that burns brightly until it is nothing but food for the fire [p 104].
Burusawi: neither substance nor accident
Burusawi begins with a prayer and then a straight reading: east and west mean the whole earth, so if barred from Mecca or Jerusalem, the entire earth is a mosque [p 112]. Then he adds the essence reading: in whatever place you orient yourself, He is present and reachable, since He is neither substance nor accident, and being in one direction would leave another empty of Him. He immediately qualifies: since God cannot be in a place, this means His knowledge encompasses all places [p 113].
Three features of his method show here [p 112]. He leans on Ghazali's commentary on the divine names, which explains that every expanse ends at a limit except God's, and that a servant's own "expanse" lies in knowledge and in a character not cramped by fear of poverty, envy or greed [p 114]. He quotes Rumi: a mangy dog wearing a lion's skin will be tested by the lion's roar [p 115]. And he tells stories. Asked why people raise their hands skyward if God is not in a direction, he answers that heaven holds God's treasures, so the supplicant points to the royal treasury when asking the King [p 115]. Then the tale of al-Juwayni, who proved God transcends space by noting that both the Prophet at the height of his ascension and Jonah in the belly of the whale addressed God as "You", a form used for one who is present; if God were in one place, both could not be right [p 116].
Alusi: synthesis with a Sufi coda
Alusi reads east and west as the two horizons, and mentions a view that on a spherical earth every point is east from one side and west from another [p 116]. He records the grammar, the occasions and a sound hadith that the earth was made clean as a place of prostration, a privilege he thinks earlier communities may not have had [p 117 to 118]. He closes with an explicitly allusive section that quotes Kashani: one countenance only, multiplied by the mirrors that reflect it [p 119].
The Modern Turn: Unity, Not Ritual
The Manar: figurative language and reform
'Abduh, as reported by Rashid Rida, explains why there is a qibla at all. Worshippers should face the Worshipped, but God transcends matter and direction, so people were told to face a specific place and God made facing it like facing His countenance [p 120]. Rida concludes that one should worship God anywhere, since one's Worshipped One is not confined [p 120 to 121]. The Manar also offers a fresh social reading: Muslims in each country face one of the four directions, so the community as a whole prays towards all of them while all face God [p 121].
The deeper lesson is the link with the previous verse. Q. 2:114 condemns those who bar worship in mosques; Q. 2:115 corrects the false idea, held by earlier religions, that God may be worshipped only in one temple. This establishes a credal rule: God cannot be limited by direction or confined to place [p 122]. 'Abduh treats this subtle linkage as a mark of the Qur'an's style and wishes Arabic writers had imitated its freedom of expression [p 122 to 123].
Mawdudi: a God who is not small
Mawdudi skips the juristic debate. His gloss is simple: God "is the possessor of all places and directions but He Himself is not limited to any particular place or direction" [p 123]. Assigning a direction for worship does not mean God lives there, and arguing over why the qibla changed is not worth the debate. All-embracing means God is not limited, mean or narrow-minded, as people imagine when they liken Him to themselves; All-knowing means He knows who remembers Him, where, when and with what intention [p 123 to 124]. The editors read the last point as an attack on hypocrisy, a common modernist theme [p 124].
Fadl Allah: a monotheistic truth
Fadl Allah calls the verse the expression of a "monotheistic truth": God is not a body that exists in one space rather than another [p 124]. Wherever you turn, you find God before you, displayed in creation through the greatness of its Creator [p 124]. He then asks which occasion is right (the Jewish objection, voluntary prayer on a journey per the imams, or honest error per Jabir) and answers that nothing in the verse ties it to prayer. If God commanded one direction at one time, He can command another later, because the first was chosen for its wisdom, not because God is located there. The verse permits turning to God anywhere unless a proof, as for obligatory prayer, requires a direction [p 125].
| Reading of "face" | Who holds it |
|---|---|
| God Himself ("there is God") | Muqatil, Hud, Tabari (reported), Tabrisi (reported) |
| The qibla or direction | Mujahid, al-Hasan, Qatada (via Tabari, Tabrisi, Abu Hayyan); Zamakhshari; Alusi; Manar |
| God's pleasure or satisfaction | Tabari (reported), Tabrisi, Razi |
| Purpose or intention | Razi |
| Essence self-disclosed through all attributes | Kashani, Burusawi, Alusi (allusive) |
| Rank, majesty and grandeur | Abu Mansur (via Abu Hayyan, Alusi) |
| A real attribute of One who has a face | Reported by Tabari; criticised by Abu Hayyan |
Table 9. Seven readings of "the face of God" in the chapter [p 87 to 124].
What This Chapter Teaches
- One verse, two agendas. The same words served jurists asking about valid prayer and theologians asking whether God has a body. The editors show the second steadily overtaking the first.
- Latitude narrows, then widens. Early reports grant wide latitude, Shi'i and later Sunni jurists confine it to voluntary prayer and genuine error, and modern readers widen the verse again into a statement about God rather than about ritual.
- Anti-anthropomorphism unites rivals. Mu'tazili, Ash'ari, Twelver, Sufi and reformist all deny that God's face is a bodily part, while differing on what it then means.
- Context is a method. Tabrisi, Abu Hayyan, Burusawi and the Manar all read Q. 2:115 through Q. 2:114, which turns a ritual rule into a statement that worship cannot be stopped by destroying buildings.
- Interfaith edges. The Negus report, the Jewish objection and the Christian eastern direction show tafsir working inside a world of Abrahamic neighbours, sometimes polemical, sometimes generous.
Chapter 2. God's Throne and the Seat of Knowledge (Q. 2:255), Part A
God, there is no god except Him, the Living, the Eternal Sustainer. Slumber seizes Him not, neither sleep; to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth. Who is there that shall intercede with Him except by His permission? He knows what lies before them and what is after them, and they encompass nothing of His knowledge except such as He wills. His seat embraces the heavens and the earth, and the preserving of them wearies Him not. He is the High, the Tremendous. This is the longest chapter of the anthology, running to more than 170 pages [p 127 to 298]. This first half covers the editors' framing and the readings from Muqatil to Abu Hayyan [p 127 to 212].
Three Problems Before Any Commentary
The editors open with three issues of translation that shape everything after them [p 127 to 130].
| Issue | The difficulty | The editors' decision |
|---|---|---|
| "Throne verse" or "seat verse"? | English translations (Arberry, Pickthall, Yusuf Ali, Dawood, Abdel Haleem) render both kursi and 'arsh as "throne", erasing a distinction the commentators argue over | Call it the kursi verse; "seat" for kursi, "throne" for 'arsh. "Chair" and "footstool" rejected |
| The name al-qayyum | The root q-w-m gives both "the one who keeps things upright" and "the one constantly getting up to attend", that is, ever-watchful (compare Q. 13:33) | "Eternal Sustainer" by default; "Ever-watchful" when a gloss argues for that sense |
| ma bayna aydihim wa ma khalfahum | Literally "what is between their hands and what is behind them"; can be spatial or temporal, future or past | "What lies before them and what is after them", with the ambiguity flagged |
Table 10. Three translation problems in Q. 2:255 [p 127 to 130].
The case for "seat" is worth pausing on. Among the commentators there is a clear philological preference for reading kursi as knowledge and 'arsh as dominion, and never the reverse [p 128]. English "seat" carries the same figurative range as Latin sedes: seat of knowledge, seat of power, seat of wisdom. The only other Qur'anic use of kursi is Solomon's in Q. 38:34, which the editors read as an echo of the Hebrew "throne of David", a symbol of a divinely established office rather than a piece of furniture [p 128 to 129]. The Queen of Sheba, by contrast, has an 'arsh, which evokes a royal retinue; and Joseph raises his parents onto an 'arsh where they bow to him, which suggests the word means a whole raised platform, close to the early Christian idea of the empyrean [p 129 n.10].
Five Themes the Commentators Pursue
The editors sort the commentaries under five headings [p 130 to 134].
God's seat. The kursi sums up the clauses before it by expressing God's total power and knowledge, which is why it names the verse. Most theologians disliked giving God a literal seat or throne. Prophetic reports describe the difference between seat and throne mainly as one of size, yet Tabari at times seems resigned to their being the same thing. Some reports in 'Ayyashi make the seat greater than the throne; Tabari cites one making the throne superior [p 131].
Names and attributes. The verse opens with oneness, so every name that follows belongs to one God. "Living" and "Eternal Sustainer" are linked: because God is eternally alive He sustains His creation, or, on the other reading, because He is ever-living He is ever-watchful. The next clause about slumber confirms the second reading for those who hold it. Some commentators note the logic of the order: a person may resist drowsiness yet finally fall asleep, while one who never sleeps will certainly never drowse [p 131 to 132]. The verse ends with "the High, the Tremendous", so it moves from God's intimate involvement with creation to His transcendence [p 132].
Universe and creation. "The heavens and the earth" are read as the subtle and dense spheres of being, or spiritual and physical. They appear twice: first to establish God as owner, then to prepare for the closing statement of His height [p 132].
Intercession and angels. The clause on intercession leaves the door open while placing the key in God's hand. Q. 39:44 says all intercession belongs to God; this verse confirms others may intercede only by His permission [p 133]. Angels enter because late-antique Jewish and Christian traditions saw them as intercessors, and because the Qur'an itself shows the throne-bearers asking forgiveness for believers (Q. 40:7, 42:5) [p 133].
Devotional use. The verse is a staple of popular piety with great protective value. Reports promise Paradise to one who recites it after each obligatory prayer, and protection from a thousand worldly and a thousand otherworldly adversities for a single recitation [p 134].
Who Intercedes? A Map of Answers
The intercession clause produces one of the clearest confessional maps in the chapter [p 133 to 134, 136 to 137].
| Commentator or school | Who may intercede | Underlying concern |
|---|---|---|
| Muqatil | Angels, only by God's command; the verse rebuts worship of angels, Ezra or Jesus | Polemic against intermediaries |
| Hud (Ibadi) | Effectively no one; the question means "no one" | Moral agency alone decides one's fate; unrepented grave sins are not forgiven |
| 'Ayyashi (Twelver) | The imams: Ja'far al-Sadiq says "We are those intercessors" | Imam as key to salvation |
| Tabari | Prophets, God's friends, His obedient servants | Answer to idolaters who said their idols bring them near God |
| Zamakhshari (Mu'tazili) | Prophets and angels as God permits | Intercession fits a theory of redemption but cannot be inferred by reason |
| Razi (Ash'ari) | Angels, prophets, the truthful, martyrs, the righteous; even grave sinners may be rescued from Hell | Refutes al-Qaffal's Mu'tazili restriction |
Table 11. Readings of "Who is there that shall intercede with Him except by His permission?" [p 133, 135 to 136, 143, 149, 171, 193 to 195].
The editors' notes sketch the background. Intercession was contested in the 2nd/8th century. Opponents feared it gave grave sinners hope of release from Hell after a purging stay, a hope not explicit in scripture [p 136]. Ibadis and Mu'tazilis accepted the Prophet's intercession for minor sins, but not for unrepented major ones, and denied that any soul leaves the Fire [p 137 n.28]. For Sunnis, the Prophet's intercession became a favour to the whole community; for Shi'is, it prefigured the intercessory power of the imams [p 136 to 137 n.27]. The editors also argue that the Qur'an does not deny intercession outright: its primary motive is to assert that God allows it as He wills [p 138 n.31].
The Early Narrative Layer: Muqatil, Hud, Qummi, 'Ayyashi
Muqatil: four faces under the seat
Muqatil glosses the verse by short paraphrase and then attaches a storyteller's narrative, as he tends to do for key verses [p 134 to 135]. Slumber is "a light wind from the direction of the head" that leaves a person halfway between sleep and waking. Everything in the heavens and earth, including angels, Ezra and Jesus, are God's servants and property. "What lies before them and after them" refers to the angels: what was before and after their creation [p 135].
Then comes the cosmic picture. Each leg of the seat is as long as the seven heavens, and the seven earths beneath it are like a ring in an open desert. Four angels bear it, each with four faces, their feet below the rock under the lowest earth. One face is human and asks provision for humankind; one is a bull, asking provision for grazing beasts; one an eagle, for birds; one a lion, for beasts of prey [p 136]. The bull-angel still carries a mark of shame from the day the Israelites worshipped the calf [p 136].
The editors point out how closely this tracks Ezekiel's four living creatures, which stand beneath a throne and carry the divine chariot that became central to Jewish merkavah mysticism [p 136 n.26]. They suggest early exegetes kept four bearers for the kursi because Q. 69:17 assigns eight to the 'arsh [p 135].
Hud: the Basran voice of al-Hasan
Hud draws almost entirely on al-Hasan al-Basri [p 136]. "Allah" and "the Compassionate" are names no creature may take. The Ever-watchful watches every soul's earnings and keeps a record until requital. Slumber is drowsiness, sleep is sleep that overwhelms. On intercession he takes the question as a flat denial, matching Q. 21:28 and 10:3 [p 137 to 138]. Some say the seat is "the support for a thing and what keeps it upright", though only its Creator knows the throne's extent [p 138]. He ends with a prophetic saying the editors flag as weighty for later debates about the limits of knowledge: "Do not reflect upon God but reflect upon what He has created" [p 138], and with reports naming this as the greatest verse of the greatest sura [p 139].
Qummi: a verse that teaches the imamate
Qummi's distinctive move is to turn the cosmology into an argument about succession [p 139]. He cites a recitation from 'Ali al-Rida that weaves in phrases from Q. 20:6 and 59:22 and runs on into 2:256 and 2:257, adding that "thus was it sent down" [p 139 to 141]. In this reading the idols (taghut) are those who robbed the Prophet's family of their rights, and "the most firm handle" is loyalty (walaya) to 'Ali and the imams [p 140 to 141]. The editors explain that some early Twelvers used such glossed recitations to support the claim that the received text was incomplete, a view later rejected by Mufid, Tusi and Tabrisi [p 140 n.39].
The four-angel story then becomes a moral warning. The bull-angel bowed his head in shame when the calf was worshipped; the trees dried up and grew thorns when a son was attributed to God. What then of a people who changed the Prophet's sunna and abandoned his bequest about 'Ali, and fear no punishment? [p 141 to 142]. The editors read this as equating rejection of the bequest with polytheism [p 139].
'Ayyashi: the pinnacle of the Qur'an
'Ayyashi's reports focus on the verse's liturgical value and the seat's size [p 142 to 143]. Every thing has a pinnacle, and the pinnacle of the Qur'an is this verse; Ja'far al-Sadiq says he reads it to rise a grade [p 143]. Asked whether the seat contains the heavens or the reverse, he answers: "Everything is in the kursi", including the throne itself [p 144].
One anecdote stands out. Ja'far was seen sitting with one leg crossed over the other. Asked whether this was disapproved, he explained that the Jews claimed God sat this way to rest after creation, and that God sent down this verse, with its denial of slumber, to refute that [p 144]. The editors also note textual oddities: one report opens "the jinn say", another "the devils say", phrases absent from some manuscripts and possibly traces of polemic [p 143 n.50, n.54].
Tabari: Collecting Everything, Then Choosing
Tabari's method is visible here at full scale [p 145 to 154]. He paraphrases each phrase in his own words, then lists reports.
On "Living", he records three positions: God is called living because He directs affairs, not because He literally lives; He has life as an attribute; or it is simply a name He gave Himself, which we repeat in obedience [p 146]. On slumber he collects a vocabulary of drowsiness from Ibn 'Abbas, Qatada, al-Dahhak, al-Suddi, al-Rabi' and Ibn Zayd. Ibn Zayd's illustration is memorable: a man half-woken who might draw his sword on his own family [p 147].
His own interpretation is a short argument. If God slept, sleep would overpower Him; if He drowsed, the heavens and the earth would perish, since their survival depends on His management [p 148]. He follows it with the story of Moses and the two bottles: the angels keep Moses awake, hand him a bottle in each hand, and leave; he dozes, the bottles knock together and break. Ma'mar explains this as an image of the heavens and earth in God's hands [p 148 to 149].
Figure 35. Tabari's survey of what the kursi is, and his two-tier verdict [p 150 to 152].
His handling of the seat shows him weighing two kinds of authority [p 150 to 152]. He lists views: knowledge (Ibn 'Abbas); the place of the feet, which "creaks like a new camel saddle" (Abu Musa al-Ash'ari); a footstool before the throne (al-Suddi, al-Dahhak); the throne itself (al-Hasan). He says the most suitable reading comes from a prophetic report in which God sits on the seat with four fingers' breadth to spare. Yet the reading the plain text supports is Ibn 'Abbas's: the seat is knowledge, since "preserving them wearies Him not" refers to what He knows, just as the angels pray "You embrace all things in mercy and knowledge" (Q. 40:7) [p 151]. He backs this with philology: a quire of written paper is a kurrasa, and scholars are called karasiyy, the props on which others lean, and the tent-pegs of the earth [p 151 to 152].
Abu Hatim al-Razi: Philology Against the Pagan Past
Although an Isma'ili missionary, Abu Hatim offers no esoteric reading here. His glosses show how philology and exegesis worked together, and how keen he was to set Qur'anic monotheism against pre-Islamic religion [p 154].
- Allah. The name belongs to God alone; all other beautiful names act as attributes of this one. Idolaters called their idols "gods" (aliha) but never claimed the name Allah, though people may be called mighty, king or merciful [p 154 to 155].
- Its form. He derives Allah from al-ilah, the definite article fused with the root, and pronounced with emphasis because of the dignity of what it names. The pagans in turn derived al-Lat from Allah and al-'Uzza from al-'Aziz [p 156].
- Living. The prayer formula "salutations belong to God" (al-tahiyyat lillah) originally meant "life belongs to God". Al-Hasan explains that pagans stroked their small idols, wishing them eternal life, so Muslims were told that eternal life belongs to God alone [p 157].
- Seat. He cites Ja'far al-Sadiq: throne, heavens and earth all sit inside the seat like a ring in a desert, and the verb shows the seat is the active one that contains them. He even quotes the Gospel saying about not swearing by heaven, God's seat, or earth, His footstool [p 158].
- The Mu'tazili poem. Ibn Qutayba records that some read kursi as knowledge on the strength of a verse using yukarsi'u ("to know"). He objects that one word has a hamza and the other does not, and identifies the reading as Mu'tazili, aimed at removing anthropomorphism [p 158 to 159].
Ja'far b. Mansur: Portals and Letters
Ja'far b. Mansur reads the verse through cosmic hierarchy and letter symbolism [p 159]. The phrases about the heavens and earth are "portals" of the attributes and of God's knowledge. The throne is the first, hidden portal, beyond mind and senses; the seat is the second, outward portal of the unseen, the "portal of inscribing", where knowledge of visible things is kept [p 159 to 160 and notes].
From the seat, God makes created things into twenty-eight letters in seven limits. Seven "mother" letters (alif to kha) spell out to sixteen; sin names the seat and shin the throne; twelve more letters follow; nun and waw sit inside the spellings of others. The final ha, which completes the name Allah, points to God, the furthest limit of what creatures can know [p 160 to 162]. The first seven letters stand for the seven enunciator-prophets (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and the Mahdi), the last seven for the imams who complete their work [p 162]. The editors note that the arithmetic in the printed text does not quite work: one letter has been included twice, and the seventh governing letter is never named, perhaps a veiled pointer to the awaited Qa'im [p 161 n.119, n.123 to 124].
Maybudi: Love Poetry, Then a Literal Seat
Maybudi's third "turn" on the verse is a hymn in rhymed Persian prose that soon becomes love mysticism [p 162 to 163]. God is the qibla of the seeker and the keepsake of the mystic's heart; Allah is a banquet for those mad with love, a lamp in the breasts of those who affirm His oneness [p 164]. He cites Junayd: one who says "Allah" with pleasure while filling his heart with love of another will find God his enemy [p 164]. Shibli, asked what he eats and drinks, replies that remembrance of his Lord feeds his soul, praise clothes it and shame before his Lord is its drink [p 166]. On intercession he quotes Ansari: those whom God favoured sought Him through Him and arrived; those without favour sought Him by themselves and were cut off [p 168].
Then comes a surprise. On the seat, Maybudi refuses metaphor outright. The words imply direction and place; reading kursi as knowledge is the way of the misguided and the ignorant's metaphorical interpretation; the Sunni position takes the words as they stand, without interpreting or altering them [p 169]. The editors call this unusual in a tradition that loves metaphor [p 163].
Zamakhshari: The Seat as Pure Image
Zamakhshari, the Mu'tazili, insists the seat is a metaphor for majesty [p 170]. In theologians' terms "the Living" is the one who truly knows and truly has power. The denial of slumber confirms that He is ever-watchful, since one who can be overcome by sleep cannot always be watching [p 170].
He offers four meanings of "His seat embraces" [p 171 to 172]:
- The seat is as wide as the heavens and earth, but it is only imagery for majesty, like the grasp and the rolled-up heavens of Q. 39:67; there is no real chair, no sitting and no one seated.
- It is knowledge, since a scholar has a seat.
- It is dominion, since a king has a seat.
- A report says God created a seat in front of the throne, tiny beside it.
He then explains why the clauses stand without conjunctions: each is so clearly tied to the last that a conjunction would come between a stick and its bark. In his analysis the verse sets out five things: God's management of creation, His kingship, His greatness, His knowledge of whom He approves for intercession, and the breadth of His knowledge or majesty [p 172]. Asked why this verse is so praised, he answers that, like Sura 112, it is about God's oneness and greatest attributes. So the noblest knowledge is that of "the people of justice and unity" (the Mu'tazila), and a reader should not be put off by how many enemies they have, since the noble are always envied [p 173].
Tabrisi: The Classical Shi'i Grid
Tabrisi applies his standard sections: merits, language, meaning, plus occasion and verse order [p 173 to 174]. His merits section draws freely on Sunni sources such as Tha'labi: the verse has a tongue and two lips that praise God at the leg of the throne; it contains fifty words with fifty blessings in each [p 174 to 175]. His language section adds poetry for sina and the verses on karasiyy as learned men [p 175 to 176]. He distinguishes 'uluww, height that can mean power, from rif'a, which refers to physical place, so God is "high in power" and not "elevated" [p 176 to 177].
On meaning he lists four views of the seat (knowledge, the throne, dominion and power, a separate bedstead) and three of "before and after" [p 178 to 179]. On intercession he places the clause in the polemic against polytheists while leaving room for intercession by permission, which matters to Shi'is because of the imams [p 178 n.190]. He ends by reproducing 'Ali al-Rida's glossed recitation from Qummi [p 180].
Razi: The Verse as a Complete Metaphysics
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi turns the verse into a demonstration of Avicenna's Necessary Existent [p 180]. He begins with a reflection on style: the Qur'an mixes three kinds of knowledge (oneness, law, narratives), so the reader moves from garden to garden and does not tire [p 180]. He cites 'Ali's report that at Badr the Prophet repeated only "O Living, O Eternal Sustainer" in prostration until victory, and Ibn 'Abbas's view that these two names are God's greatest name [p 181 to 182].
| Step | Razi's claim |
|---|---|
| 1. Existence | Things exist. Either all are contingent, all necessary, or some of each |
| 2. Not all contingent | A whole made of contingents is itself contingent and needs a cause outside itself |
| 3. Not two necessary beings | Two would share necessity yet differ, so each would be composite, and so contingent |
| 4. One Necessary Existent | Self-subsistent and the cause of every other thing's subsistence: this is al-qayyum |
| 5. Consequences | Not composite, not in space or direction, no limbs, motion or rest; not an accident or form; knows itself and therefore all things; all else originated; predestination true |
Table 12. Razi's reading of "the Living, the Eternal Sustainer" as an Avicennan proof [p 182 to 186].
"Living" adds that the cause acts by choice and not by blind necessity, which, the editors note, lets Razi use a philosopher's proof against the philosophers' emanation theory [p 183 n.207]. So these two words are like two seas that hold all the themes of what Razi calls knowledge of God, which makes this verse plausibly the greatest name [p 186 to 187]. He even defends the word "living" against the objection that the lowest creatures share it: in the original language "living" means whatever is perfect in its kind, as revived land or a green tree is said to live, so applied to God it means absolutely perfect [p 190].
Several smaller moves show his independence [p 191 to 199]:
- Moses story. It cannot be true of Moses, since doubting whether God sleeps is unbelief; if reliable, the question came from the ignorant among his people [p 192].
- Human acts. "To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth" includes human actions, so the Ash'aris use it to prove God creates them [p 192 to 193].
- Al-Qaffal. He respects al-Qaffal as a careful commentator but says he loved the Mu'tazila more than he understood them [p 193 to 194].
- The seat. He reviews four views and accepts the sound report that it is a vast body beneath the throne and above the seventh heaven. A report placing God's feet there must be rejected or applied to the feet of the "greatest spirit" or a great angel. He praises al-Qaffal's view that God speaks through royal imagery, as He does with the Ka'ba and the Black Stone, but holds that one may not leave the plain sense without proof [p 196 to 198].
- "The High". It cannot mean spatial height. If God were finite upward, something would be above Him; an infinite dimension is impossible; the world is a sphere, so every "up" is another side's "down"; and height borrowed from place would make the place more perfect than God [p 198 to 199].
Kashani: Only He Is Worshipped
Kashani reads the verse through Ibn 'Arabi [p 200]. "No god except Him" means nothing exists except Him, so whatever people worship, they worship Him alone, knowingly or not. His life is His very essence, and everything lives by His life [p 200]. Since sleep "is the brother of death" and belongs to beings whose life is accidental, it cannot touch Him [p 201].
The seat is His knowledge, and its human counterpart is the heart. Abu Yazid al-Bistami is cited: if the world were multiplied a million times and set in a corner of the mystic's heart, he would not notice it [p 201]. The great throne is the First Spirit; in the visible world the throne and seat appear as the outermost sphere and the eighth sphere. Preserving them does not weary Him, because they do not exist apart from Him: the inner world is His hidden side and the outer world His visible side. All greatness that creatures seem to have is borrowed from His [p 201 to 202].
Abu Hayyan: Grammar as Referee
Abu Hayyan shows how blurred the line between "opinion" and "transmitted" exegesis is: he starts from reports but rarely gives chains, mixes weak and sound hadith, and makes his real contribution in grammar [p 202 to 203]. He criticises Zamakhshari for pushing Mu'tazili doctrine into everything, quoting and correcting his line on "the people of justice and unity" [p 203 to 204]. He links the verse to the one before: after the disputes of Jews, Christians and Arab polytheists, God sets out pure monotheism [p 204].
His grammar does theological work. The repeated "neither" in "neither sleep" excludes each state separately, not just their combination [p 207]. "What lies before them and after them" is not two specific things at all but a figure of speech for knowledge surrounding creatures on every side, as "struck back and belly" means the whole body [p 209]. "His knowledge" in "nothing of His knowledge" must mean "what He knows", because God's knowledge as an attribute cannot be divided [p 209]. On "wearies Him not", he prefers referring the pronoun to God, not the seat, since a seat cannot preserve anything [p 212]. He also reports a contemporary's view that the Moses sleep story was invented by the literalists [p 207].
| Commentator | What the kursi is |
|---|---|
| Muqatil | A vast physical seat; legs as long as the heavens; carried by four angels |
| Hud | A support that keeps things upright; some say it fills heaven and earth |
| Qummi, 'Ayyashi | Contains all creation, even the throne; carried by four angels |
| Tabari | Prophetic report: God's seat; plain text: knowledge |
| Abu Hatim | Contains throne, heavens and earth; reports the Mu'tazili "knowledge" reading critically |
| Ja'far b. Mansur | Second portal, the visible face of the unseen, where letters are inscribed |
| Maybudi | Literal; not knowledge; implies direction and place |
| Zamakhshari | Pure imagery of majesty (also knowledge, dominion, or a small seat) |
| Tabrisi | Four views; knowledge reported from al-Baqir and al-Sadiq first |
| Razi | A vast body below the throne, above the seventh heaven; no divine feet |
| Kashani | Knowledge, whose locus is the heart; the eighth sphere outwardly |
| Abu Hayyan | Surveys all views; reports that the throne is greater than the seat |
Table 13. What the kursi is, commentator by commentator, Muqatil to Abu Hayyan [p 135 to 211].
Chapter 2. God's Throne and the Seat of Knowledge (Q. 2:255), Part B
The second half of the chapter runs from the end of Abu Hayyan's grammar to the twentieth century: the Zaydi imams in Sharafi's compilation, the Ottoman Sufi Burusawi, the Baghdad mufti Alusi, the Cairo reformers of the Manar, Mawdudi in South Asia and Fadl Allah in Beirut [p 212 to 297]. The same verse is now asked to answer new questions: whether invocation works, whether saints may intercede, whether science can explain sleep, and whether a state can have any sovereign but God.
Abu Hayyan's Last Word: Why the Clauses Have No "And"
Abu Hayyan closes with two borrowings from Zamakhshari [p 212 to 213]. First, "the High" means height of rank and degree, not of place; Ibn 'Atiyya calls the spatial reading a view of "ignorant corporealists" not worth repeating. Second, the verse strings its clauses together with no connecting "and". Zamakhshari's answer is that each clause explains the one before, so a conjunction would come between them like something wedged between a stick and its bark. The sequence then reads as a single argument: God manages creation and never neglects it; He owns what He manages; His rank is great; He knows who merits intercession; His knowledge (or majesty) is vast. Abu Hayyan adds a list of the attributes of the essence found in the verse: oneness, life (implying eternity), power, sovereignty as an effect of power, will (implied by permission), and knowledge, all sealed by height and tremendousness [p 213].
A small editorial detail is worth noticing. Abu Hayyan's copy of the Zamakhshari passage differs from the printed Kashshaf in two words, and the translators judge one variant meaningful and the other a slip [p 213 n.307]. The anthology is careful about textual history even inside quotations.
Sharafi: The Zaydi Case Against Every Bodily Reading
Ibrahim [p 214]. The result is the most uncompromising anti-anthropomorphist reading in the chapter.
Three senses of "Living". Al-Hadi distinguishes three ways the word applies. First, beings with moving bodies and spirits that will one day leave them: angels, jinn, humans, animals. Second, plants and land "brought to life" by rain, as Arabs call a green, watered palm "alive". God is free of both. Third, the only sense that may be used of God: the one in whom acting and disposing of affairs is conceivable [p 214 to 215]. The editors add a valuable note: for most early theologians, Ash'ari and Mu'tazili alike, "living" said of God and of creatures shares only the word. The philosophers and the classical Twelver theologians objected that if no analogy at all holds, revelation could not communicate anything [p 214 n.310].
Throne as dominion. Commenting on the angels who "bear the throne" (Q. 40:7), the Zaydi texts define the throne as God's dominion and the bearing as the angels carrying out His commands in it [p 216]. Sharafi does report from the Tajrid of al-Mu'ayyad the lavish picture current elsewhere (a throne of green gem, eighty thousand years of flight between pillars, seventy thousand garments of light daily), but sets against it al-Qasim's flat refusal to affirm any of it [p 216].
Al-Hadi's list of metaphors. Al-Hadi then strings together the grasp, the assault, God's coming, the bridge, the book, the balance, the uncovering of the shin, the two hands, the face, the veil, and says "these are all metaphors", none of which may be referred to human attributes. He goes further than anyone else in the volume: throne, seat and face mean the same thing, and none of the three exists as a created object at all [p 217]. The throne is a name for God's transcendence; the seat is a name for His attributes in His essence, "one of the names of His sovereignty".
The ring argument turned around. Muqatil and others used the report that the heavens and the earth are to the seat like a ring dropped in a desert to stress how enormous the seat is. Al-Hadi uses it to show that whoever gives God a throne that "contains" Him has made the throne bigger than God, and so has made the throne his Lord [p 218 to 219]. His own image is an egg holding a chick: the seat surrounds everything without gap or exit, outside things by enclosing them and inside them because they are within it. Then he removes the image: there is no created seat there, "nothing there except for God", and the encompassing is God's own [p 221 to 222]. Since God's knowledge is not other than Himself, to be encompassed by His knowledge is to be encompassed by Him [p 218 n.326]. His son al-Murtada adds that only someone ignorant of Arabic thinks angels circle a physical throne [p 219].
The anthropomorphists named. Al-Hadi also catalogues the "deviant folk" of his time: those who say God created Adam in His own form and laughs until His molars show; those who make Him a light among lights who touched the Prophet with cold fingertips; those who expect to see Him on the Day of Resurrection seated on the throne, revealing His shins [p 220]. The editors' note sets out the wider dispute over the vision of God: Sunnis held that God would be seen at some point, while Mu'tazilis, Zaydis and Twelvers denied it, citing Q. 6:103 [p 220 n.333].
Burusawi: Invocation, the Greatest Name and the Heart as Throne
The Ottoman Jilvati master Burusawi (d. 1137/1725) writes the richest Sufi reading in the chapter, mixing Ghazali, Rumi, Jami, Hafiz and Sa'di with Ottoman learned Sufism, the Kubrawi Ta'wilat Najmiyya, and Razi [p 223]. The editors stress that he treats the verse as something to be practised, not only explained.
The name "Allah". It is the greatest of the ninety-nine names because it gathers all the attributes, while every other name carries a single meaning; and it is never used, literally or figuratively, of anyone else. The servant's share in it is ta'alluh, which the translators carefully define not as becoming God but as becoming no obstacle to the divine qualities, like clean glass to sunlight [p 223 to 224 n.342]. Burusawi cites the line of the poet Labid that the Prophet called the truest an Arab ever spoke: "Is not everything save God false?" [p 225]. He also plays with the letters: drop the first letter of Allah and you get "to God", drop another and you get "to Him", drop another and you are left with "He", each a Qur'anic phrase [p 225].
When the name works. Burusawi's master Uftada told of preachers whose single cry of "O God" made a congregation weep and a mob flee, and asked why the same word has no effect when we say it. His answer: they had purified themselves; we have not, though grace can come at any time [p 225 to 226]. The point returns later through Bayazid Bistami: asked for the greatest name, he said it has no fixed form; empty your heart for God's oneness and call on Him by any name [p 232].
Three degrees of "no god but God". Beginners say "there is no god but God"; those in contemplation say "there is no god but You"; the perfect, annihilated in God, hear God Himself say "there is no god but Me" [p 227]. Burusawi defends the Sufi practice of invoking with the pronoun "He" (huwa) against critics who called it a mere pronoun, probably the puritan Kadizadeli preachers of his century [p 228 n.367]. His own shaykh, however, ranked the full formula above "Allah, Allah" or "He, He", because it joins a negation and an affirmation. The first half of the testimony points to union, where creatures vanish; the second, "Muhammad is the Messenger of God", points to separation, where creatures subsist through God [p 228 to 229].
Life, sustaining, sleep. From Ghazali's commentary on the divine names he takes two definitions: the Living is the one who acts and perceives, so that the absolutely living is the one whose perception and action leave nothing outside; the Eternal Sustainer is the one who subsists by Himself and by whom everything else subsists [p 230 to 231]. On sleep he collects ascetic stories: Bayazid saying "Nothing was disclosed to me until I turned nights into days", and the slave girl who asked her new master whether his Lord sleeps and then, "Are you not ashamed to sleep when your Lord does not sleep?" [p 234].
The Prophet as intercessor. The Ta'wilat Najmiyya reads "except by His permission" as pointing to Muhammad, promised the praised station. Following Mulla Fanari, Burusawi describes the Prophet opening the gate of intercession on the Last Day, after which angels, prophets, saints and believers intercede, and last of all God, the Most Merciful, brings out of Hell people who knew His oneness by reason alone without following any prophet [p 236 to 238]. He presents this explicitly as an unveiling received from his shaykh. The clause is also used against the Mu'tazila, who in his account deny intercession [p 236].
The seat, literal and inward. Burusawi treats the seat as an image for God's greatness, comparable to the Ka'ba as God's "house" and the Black Stone as His "right hand": nobody thinks God lives in the Ka'ba, so nobody should think He sits on a chair [p 240]. Yet he also accepts the report that the seat is a body before the throne, perhaps the eighth sphere, and quotes Muqatil's four angels in the forms of man, bull, lion and eagle [p 240 to 241]. The Ta'wilat resolves the tension with a rule: keep the outward form of every scriptural object and understand its meaning through it, never cancelling the form [p 241]. Inwardly the throne is the human heart and the seat is the "secret" (sirr), and Rumi's lines on the divine saying "I am not contained in earth or heaven, but in the believer's heart" make the heart larger than the cosmic throne [p 242].
Talisman. The chapter ends with the verse's protective power: Suyuti's count of seventeen mentions of God in it, reports of devils fleeing a house for thirty days, and Ubayy b. Ka'b's encounter with a jinn who stole from his date store and revealed that this verse protects from morning to evening. The Prophet's verdict: "The foul thing told the truth" [p 244 to 245]. Burusawi insists, characteristically, that efficacy depends on the reciter's state, not the words alone [p 246].
Figure 43. Burusawi and the Ta'wilat Najmiyya: each cosmic object has a counterpart in the person, and the believer's heart is wider than the throne [p 241 to 242].
Alusi: Ash'ari Grammar, Salafi Caution, Sufi Allusion
Alusi's commentary is long, grammatical and heavily dependent on Razi and Baydawi, often without acknowledgement [p 246, 249 n.425, 253 n.434]. Its interest lies in how he balances three loyalties.
Logic of the testimony. He spends pages on the syntax of "no god except Him" and whether it denies only the existence of other gods or also their possibility. His solution: since necessary existence is the root of every perfection, and only what is necessarily existent deserves worship, denying that any other deserves worship already denies that any other could exist [p 247 to 248]. He also allows that a simple denial of other gods is the minimum of faith most people can manage, without the proofs [p 247].
Against Razi on "Living". Razi had argued that "living" really means "perfect in its kind", as when farmers speak of "reviving dead land". Alusi rejects this sharply. If God may not praise Himself as "living" because animals share the word, then "hearing" and "seeing" would fall too, which no Sunni accepts; and no dictionary gives "life" the sense of "perfection" [p 250 to 251]. His own position: life in God is a real attribute whose nature is unknowable, and he openly declares that in such matters he leans to the way of the pious predecessors (salaf) [p 251]. The editors read this as part of his move toward Ibn Taymiyya noted in the introduction.
The seat. He reports every view: a body before the throne, the place of God's feet, the throne itself, His power, an angel, knowledge, kingship, or a pure image with no seat and no sitting, which he says most later scholars held to escape corporealism. Then he pulls back: sound reports establish the seat, and denying it to avoid corporealism would force one to deny many attributes. The safe course of the predecessors is to class it with the ambiguous verses and leave its knowledge to God [p 256 to 258]. For the Sufis, he adds, there is no difficulty: the seat is the manifestation of God's attributes of action, the "feet" are command and prohibition, bringing into being and taking out of being, and the creaking saddle hints at the meeting of opposites [p 258].
Merit and its limits. Alusi accepts the reports that this is the greatest verse but dismisses some merit reports as baseless, including the one Burusawi cited about an angel recording the reciter's good deeds [p 260]. Following al-Ash'ari and al-Baqillani, he holds that one part of God's word cannot be superior to another; "greatest" means "great", and the superiority lies in the reward God attaches to it [p 261]. His Sufi allusions close the section: the seat is the heart of the knower, wide enough that, in Bayazid's words, the whole world could fall into a corner of it unnoticed [p 262].
| Commentator | What the kursi is | Method behind the answer |
|---|---|---|
| Sharafi (al-Hadi, al-Qasim) | Nothing created: a name for God's sovereignty and encompassing; same as throne and face | Strict metaphor against anthropomorphism |
| Burusawi | Outwardly a body before the throne, maybe the eighth sphere; inwardly the "secret" of the heart | Keep the form, read the meaning (Kubrawi rule) |
| Alusi | Established by sound reports; its nature left to God. For Sufis, manifestation of the attributes of action | Salafi deferral plus Sufi allusion |
| Manar ('Abduh, Rida) | Most likely God's knowledge; if a creature, part of the unseen, not to be speculated about | Context of the verse; refusal of Greek cosmology |
| Mawdudi | Sovereignty, dominion and authority | Political theology of divine rule |
| Fadl Allah | God's dominion and authority, managing and preserving without strain | Zamakhshari's third sense; existential reading |
Table 14. What the kursi is, Sharafi to Fadl Allah [p 216 to 222, 240 to 242, 256 to 258, 278, 282, 295].
The Manar: Life, Science and the Attack on Intercession
The Manar commentary of Muhammad 'Abduh and Rashid Rida uses the verse for two purposes: a rational account of God's oneness and life, and a sustained attack on popular intercession [p 263].
What "god" means. 'Abduh accepts Suyuti's gloss of ilah as "the one rightly worshipped", but only if worship is understood as the soul's surrender to an unseen authority it cannot grasp [p 264]. Anything people credit with such hidden power becomes, in practice, a god, whether a stone, a tree, an animal or a human. His examples are Egyptian: people who expect blessing from the tree at the mosque of al-Hanafi or from al-Kalshani's sandal are, in reality, worshipping them [p 264 n.464].
Life as the principle of knowledge and power. Rida disagrees with his own teacher's gloss of "Living" as "Ever-enduring", which he finds remote from the text. Life in God means the principle that makes knowledge, power and will possible, and so refutes the "materialists" who think dead matter produced an ordered cosmos [p 265]. He reproduces 'Abduh's argument from the Risalat al-tawhid: every perfection possible to the Necessary Being must belong to it; life is a perfection; and a Being who gives life cannot lack it [p 265 to 267].
A dialogue in the style of a school reader. Rida then quotes from his own Kitab al-'aqa'id a three-way conversation between a schoolboy, his brother (a modern physician) and their father (a Sufi scholar). The physician explains plant nutrition by oxygen, nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus; the shaykh first denies that plants have life, then is persuaded that natural causes and God's power are compatible; all agree that God's life differs from ours as the intrinsic from the derived, the eternal from the temporary, the book from the recipient [p 268 to 271]. The editors note that, unlike Rida's earlier debates between "the reformer and the imitator", here the young man and the shaykh largely agree [p 268 n.474].
Sleep and modern physiology. Baydawi's medieval account (vapours rising to the brain) is set beside modern theories of toxic gases or fluid build-up in the nerves; either way, sleep belongs entirely to bodies, and God is beyond bodies [p 273 to 274]. 'Abduh adds the reading of "seize" as "overwhelm", so that the clause climbs from the weaker state to the stronger [p 274].
Intercession as a misunderstanding of God. This is the heart of the Manar reading. Ordinary intercession works by telling a ruler something he did not know, or by pressing on him through favour. 'Abduh's example: if the just caliph 'Umar decided to banish a troublemaker, an intercessor could only change his mind by showing him something new about the public good; a tyrant might yield to a courtier's plea against the public good [p 275 to 276]. Since God knows everything before and after His creatures, both routes are closed. The exception "except by His permission" is an emphatic negation, like "no soul shall speak except by His permission" (Q. 11:105), not a promise that permission will be given [p 274]. Rida concedes that the hadith reports about the Prophet's intercession divide earlier and later scholars, and suggests either leaving them to God or understanding intercession, with Ibn Taymiyya, as a prayer God answers by an act He had always decreed [p 277 to 278].
The reformers' tone is moral and fierce. Muslims recite these verses and still rest their hopes on intercessors, says Rida, quoting the ascetic poet Abu'l-'Atahiya: "You hope for salvation, and yet you have not followed its route. Nay! A ship does not sail on land." [p 279 to 280]. 'Abduh warns that Muslims have copied the People of the Book, who relied on their forefathers, and have even outdone them [p 280].
The seat as knowledge. 'Abduh thinks the context points to knowledge: what could an intercessor tell a God whose seat of knowledge embraces everything [p 278]? If the seat is instead a creature, it belongs to the unseen, to be believed without speculation; to call it the eighth of the nine Greek spheres is "inventing things about God", which Rida counts among the grave sins [p 278].
Mawdudi: Sovereignty and the Refusal of Rivals
Mawdudi's short commentary, from the Tafhim al-Qur'an, reads the verse as a charter of divine sovereignty [p 281 to 282]. Godhead belongs entirely to the self-existent Being on whom the order of the universe rests; to set up any other object of worship "instead of or in addition to" Him "amounts to declaring war on reality" [p 281]. "Slumber seizes Him not" refutes those who model God on themselves, such as the biblical statement that God rested on the seventh day. "Except by His permission" denies that saints, angels or prophets can press their will on God; the editors note that including saints is aimed at shrine visitation in South Asia, and that Mawdudi avoids attacking prophetic intercession directly while casting doubt on it [p 281 n.489, 282 n.490]. "They encompass nothing of His knowledge" shows that no creature knows enough to share in governing the universe, and the editors see here an implied case against human-made constitutions [p 282 n.491, n.493]. The kursi itself is simply "sovereignty, dominion and authority" [p 282].
Fadl Allah: Consciousness, Intercession as Edification, Simplicity Against Philosophy
Fadl Allah writes in the vocabulary of contemporary religious consciousness (wa'y), and the editors note his preference for the existential force of the verse over scholastic philology [p 282 to 283].
Living and Sustainer. God's life has no before or after, so a human can live in continuous attachment to Him in a way impossible with any other person, who comes after us or dies before us [p 285]. Qayyum means standing over things, as opposed to sitting or sleeping: managing, guarding and keeping the balance of the cosmic and human order, which is why all affairs must be referred back to Him [p 286]. Sleep would interrupt this standing-over, and God, beyond bodies, is beyond it [p 286 to 287]. Ownership by anyone else is only relative, and realising that all things belong to God shrinks their importance in our eyes [p 287].
Intercession affirmed, then disciplined. Unlike the Manar, Fadl Allah affirms intercession: God honours certain prophets and saints (for the Shi'a, first the imams) by letting them intercede for certain sinners. But forgiveness, relief and reward all come from God, so there is no point in turning to the intercessors themselves, not even as a means; one asks God to be among those for whom they are allowed to intercede [p 288 to 289]. He then argues with two contemporaries. Against Tabataba'i's Mizan, which treats all causation in creation as a kind of "creational intercession", he insists that intercession is a technical term for one person persuading another and should not be stretched to cover causality [p 289 to 291]. Against Makarim Shirazi's Amthal, which says the seeker must build a spiritual bond with the intercessor, he agrees that intercession is "an instrument of edification" and not patronage or nepotism, but places the decisive relationship between the intercessor and God, not between the seeker and the intercessor [p 291 to 293].
Knowledge and the imams. "They encompass nothing of His knowledge" means that even prophets have no built-in access to the unseen; God gives them what their mission requires. Fadl Allah draws a pointed conclusion: the theory of "cosmic authority" (walaya takwiniyya) that some scholars ascribe to prophets and imams is invalid [p 294]. The editors note that this is controversial among Shi'i theologians [p 294 n.522].
Simplicity over philosophy. For Fadl Allah the verse offers a picture of God that philosophy cannot supply: lordship, management, provision, supervision and unbroken vigilance. "His existence is itself all consciousness" [p 296]. He grants philosophy a role in debate but warns that it can leave a Muslim lost between the spirit of Islam and alien premises [p 296 to 297]. Daily recitation of the verse becomes a programme of moral training that builds immunity against confusion [p 297]. The editors connect his suspicion of theory both to the Najaf seminary's coolness toward philosophy and to the practical demands of war-torn Lebanon [p 297 n.528].
| Commentator | Who may intercede? | What "except by His permission" does |
|---|---|---|
| Sharafi | Not discussed in the extracts; the stress is on God's sole encompassing | Background to transcendence |
| Burusawi | The Prophet first, then angels, prophets, saints, believers, finally God Himself | Affirms intercession against the Mu'tazila |
| Alusi | Disbelievers' gods cannot; the clause shows God's supremacy | Rhetorical question denying rivals |
| Manar | Intercession in the familiar sense is impossible with an all-knowing God | Emphatic negation, not a promise; hadith left to God or read as answered prayer |
| Mawdudi | No saint, angel or prophet can impose on God | Refutes polytheist intercession; doubts the popular doctrine |
| Fadl Allah | Prophets and saints whom God chooses to honour | Affirms, but routes every request through God; edification, not patronage |
Table 15. Intercession in the later commentaries [p 236 to 238, 254 to 255, 274 to 280, 281 to 282, 288 to 293].
The Order of "Slumber" and "Sleep": One Puzzle, Five Answers
A small rhetorical problem runs through the whole chapter and shows how commentators reuse each other. In a negation one expects the stronger term first: "sleep does not seize Him, not even slumber". The verse does the opposite [p 233, 253 to 254, 273 to 274, 287].
| Answer | Who gives it |
|---|---|
| The verse follows the natural order: drowsiness comes before sleep | Burusawi, Alusi, Manar (from Baydawi) |
| "Seize" means "overwhelm", so the clause climbs from the weaker state to the stronger | Alusi (from al-Raghib), 'Abduh |
| The repeated "not" in the middle makes the negation cover both states separately | Burusawi, Alusi |
| "Sleep" is placed last to match the rhyme of the verse (rejected as narrow) | Reported by Alusi |
| Not even the lesser state can approach Him, let alone the greater | Fadl Allah |
Table 16. Why "slumber" comes before "sleep" in Q. 2:255 [p 233, 253 to 254, 273 to 274, 287].
What the Whole Chapter Shows
Read across both halves, the chapter tests a common assumption, that traditionists read literally while rationalists read figuratively. Ibn 'Abbas supplies the "knowledge" reading; the Sufi Maybudi defends a literal seat; the Zaydi imams deny that seat, throne or face exist at all; Alusi, an Ash'ari with Sufi sympathies, ends by deferring to the predecessors; and the modern reformers, who trust science, also forbid speculation about the unseen [p 135 to 297].
| Period | Main question asked of the verse | Typical voices |
|---|---|---|
| Formative (2nd to 4th/8th to 10th c.) | What is the seat, and how large? | Muqatil, Qummi, 'Ayyashi, Tabari |
| Classical (5th to 8th/11th to 14th c.) | How do the names prove God's attributes? | Zamakhshari, Tabrisi, Razi, Abu Hayyan |
| Zaydi and Sufi traditions | Is any of this bodily? How does the verse transform the reciter? | Sharafi, Maybudi, Kashani, Burusawi |
| Late Ottoman | How to reconcile Ash'ari reason, Sufi allusion and the predecessors? | Alusi |
| Modern (14th to 15th/20th c.) | Who may intercede, and who rules? | Manar, Mawdudi, Fadl Allah |
Table 17. How the questions put to the kursi verse shift over thirteen centuries [p 127 to 297].
Chapter 3. Mercy God Inscribed upon Himself (Q. 6:12)
"Say: To whom belongs what is in the heavens and the earth? Say: To God. He has prescribed for Himself mercy. He will surely gather you to the Day of Resurrection, of which there is no doubt." The verse sounds simple, but its phrase kataba 'ala nafsihi'l-rahma, literally "He has inscribed mercy upon His self", is the only place apart from Q. 6:54 where the Qur'an binds an attribute to God's own self in this way [p 299]. Fourteen commentators ask what that binding means, who receives the mercy, and why the verse ties it to the Resurrection and to people who have "forfeited their souls" [p 299 to 345].
The Editors' Map: Four Parts, Three Quarrels
The editors divide the verse into four parts: God as owner, God as essentially merciful, God as the one who gathers on the Day, and the link between losing one's soul and refusing belief [p 299]. They note that the basmala itself names God and then two names of mercy, with no name of rigour, as further evidence of how central the attribute is [p 299 n.1].
Three quarrels run through the chapter.
Is God obliged? For the Ash'aris any obligation placed on God insults His omnipotence; for the Mu'tazila any arbitrariness in His acts insults His justice [p 300]. Most later voices settle on a formula: God makes mercy binding on Himself out of grace, not because anything binds Him. Abu Hayyan reports this view, Burusawi repeats it almost word for word, and the Manar states the incumbency with no qualifier at all [p 300].
Who receives it? Abu Hayyan argues that because the verse names no recipient, the mercy must be universal, covering good-doer and evil-doer alike in this world [p 299, 322 to 323]. Tabrisi and Alusi, citing Kalbi, think of a special mercy shown to Muhammad's community, which is not destroyed for its denials as earlier nations were [p 314, 328 to 329].
Which comes first, loss of soul or unbelief? The verse's grammar seems to make loss the cause of unbelief. Razi takes this as proof that God's preordaining of loss and abandonment keeps people from belief, which he calls the essence of the Sunni position; Zamakhshari reads the same words to mean those whom God foreknows will choose disbelief [p 302, 313, 320].
The Formative Voices: Respite, Prayer and a Book above the Throne
Muqatil. For the earliest commentator the mercy is simply deferral: God holds back punishment from the Meccan unbelievers, who already admit that everything belongs to God even while denying the Resurrection. "Forfeited" means "cheated" their souls [p 303].
Hud. The Ibadi commentator adds a striking report from Hasan al-Basri. The Children of Israel ask Moses whether God prays, so that they may pray as He does. God answers that He does pray, and that His prayer is the precedence of His mercy over His wrath; without it they would have been destroyed [p 304]. A second report from Ibn 'Abbas glosses Q. 33:43: God's "prayer" upon His servants is mercy, and the angels' prayer is a plea for forgiveness.
Qummi. The early Twelver gloss is one line: God has made mercy obligatory upon Himself. The editors read even this as a sign that Shi'i traditionists had absorbed the rationalising theology of Baghdad before the formal turn of Shi'i theologians to Mu'tazili thought in the eleventh century [p 305].
Tabari. The great traditionist gives an overall paraphrase, then two blocks of material. The first is a cluster of reports on the size of mercy, which he quotes without dogmatic comment [p 305 to 308]:
- the hadith that when God completed creation He wrote in a Book, "Truly My mercy precedes My wrath";
- Salman al-Farisi's report, partly said to come from the Torah, that God created a hundred mercies, each filling the space between heaven and earth, kept ninety-nine and divided one among creatures; by that one portion they are kind to each other, the she-camel yearns for her calf, birds fly in flocks and fish swim in shoals, and at the Resurrection God will restore it to the other ninety-nine;
- 'Ikrima's report of a Book brought from beneath the throne after judgement, followed by an exit from the Fire of people equal to (or twice) the number of Paradise's inhabitants. Asked about Q. 5:37, which says the damned will not leave the Fire, 'Ikrima replies "Woe to you!" and explains that the verse means those who are its permanent inhabitants;
- Ka'b al-Ahbar's report that God wrote the words "My mercy comes before My wrath" with His finger, not with pen or ink.
The editors' note on 'Ikrima traces the early debate over whether Hell is eternal for all, and how the idea of a temporary, purifying punishment emerged [p 307 to 308 n.14].
Tabari's second block is grammar: he rules that "He will surely gather you" begins a new oath sentence, a promise to the faithful and a warning to idolaters, and that the root sense of "loss" is "fraud" [p 308 to 310].
| Report | Source in the chapter | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| "My mercy precedes My wrath" written in a Book | Abu Hurayra via Tabari, Razi, Abu Hayyan, Alusi, Manar | Mercy has priority, inscribed at creation |
| Written with God's finger, not pen or ink | Ka'b al-Ahbar via Tabari | Intimacy of the inscription |
| A hundred mercies, one sent down | Salman via Tabari, Razi, Alusi; Abu Hurayra via Burusawi | Measure of what awaits in the Hereafter |
| Exit from the Fire after judgement | 'Ikrima via Tabari | Mercy reaches into Hell itself |
| God prays, and His prayer is mercy | Hasan al-Basri via Hud | Mercy as God's own worship |
| Mother who would never throw her child in the fire | 'Umar via Burusawi | God is more merciful than a mother |
Table 18. The core mercy reports and where they travel in the chapter [p 304 to 308, 318, 323 to 325, 327 to 328, 339].
Maybudi: The Coin, the Bazaar and the Prophet's Plea
Maybudi's mystical section is pure rhetoric. "In the minting house of the Unseen", before creation, God stamped the coin of His servants' states with "Verily I am God" on one side and "My mercy prevails over My wrath" on the other [p 311]. On the market day of the Resurrection the Prophet pleads for "a handful of sinners", asking to dress them in the garment of mercy and reminding God of Q. 21:107 and Q. 39:53. The reply sorts the community into three: believers who want Paradise receive it, mystics who want the vision of God receive that, and sinners who want mercy receive mercy and forgiveness [p 311]. His closing prayer thanks God for favouring us "without us", not for our deserving [p 311 to 312].
The Theologians: Proofs, Respite and the Problem of Precedence
Zamakhshari. The question is a rebuke, the answer an admission no opponent can dispute. Mercy here is God guiding people to know Him by setting up proofs of His oneness in the creation of the heavens and earth; the gathering clause threatens those who ignore the proofs [p 312 to 313]. On the causal puzzle he answers that the people meant are those who lost their souls "according to God's knowledge" because they chose disbelief. The editors flag this as the Mu'tazili doctrine of promise and threat and of free choice [p 313 n.31 to 32].
Tabrisi. The Twelver gives four meanings of the prescribed mercy: graces to creatures, reward for the obedient, respite so the disobedient may repent, and (from Kalbi) deferral of punishment for Muhammad's community [p 314]. He answers the objection that unbelievers doubt the Day by saying "truth is truth, regardless of whether a liar doubts it" [p 315].
Razi. Razi reads the verse as a compact proof of a Creator, the Return and prophecy [p 316 to 317]. He then raises the sharpest theological problem in the chapter. If mercy is the will to do good and wrath the will to punish, and mercy "precedes", the later will would have a beginning, which cannot be said of God. His solution is to read precedence as a matter of quantity, not sequence: mercy outweighs wrath rather than coming earlier [p 318]. He also offers a social reading of the Resurrection: without fear of the Day, turmoil and aggression would grow without limit, so the threat of judgement is itself one of the greatest mercies in this world [p 318 to 319].
Abu Hayyan. The grammarian surveys the senses of kataba: literal writing on the Preserved Tablet, a promise, an announcement, a self-imposed obligation "out of favour and munificence, not an obligation of necessity", or a decree carried out [p 322]. The editors find it surprising that an Ash'ari should seem to endorse the Mu'tazili idea of mercy as rationally necessary [p 322 n.47].
| Commentator | What "prescribed" means | School |
|---|---|---|
| Hud, Qummi | Made incumbent on Himself | Ibadi; early Twelver |
| Tabari | Decreed that He will be merciful, delay punishment and accept repentance | Sunni traditionist |
| Zamakhshari | Made incumbent, by guiding people through proofs of oneness | Mu'tazili |
| Razi | Obligation of grace and generosity; He always gives and always promises more | Ash'ari |
| Abu Hayyan | Several senses; leans to self-imposed obligation from favour | Sunni grammarian |
| Burusawi, Alusi | Necessary as grace, since nothing can truly bind God | Sufi; Ash'ari with Sufi sympathies |
| Manar, Fadl Allah | Made incumbent, with no qualifier | Modern Sunni reform; modern Twelver |
Table 19. How each commentator reads kataba, "He has prescribed" [p 300, 303 to 305, 306, 312, 317, 322, 323, 327, 336, 342].
Figure 51. The incumbency question as a spectrum, from mercy as free grace to mercy as something God's justice requires [p 300, 313, 317, 322, 336, 320].
The Sufis: Mercy as Existence
Kashani. Mercy is "the effusion of goodness and perfection" in measure with what each receiving entity is ready to take; no one deserving the mercy of existence is denied it once ready [p 320]. Behind this stands Ibn 'Arabi: everything can exist only by receiving mercy, and even its readiness is a prior mercy [p 320 n.42]. Kashani reads the gathering as both the lesser resurrection and the greater, and the losers as those ruined by appetite, since a person is gathered with whatever he loves [p 320 to 321].
Burusawi. The Ottoman Sufi quotes Kashifi: God's mercy is essential, "His mercy is absolute and that mercy is for everything", given without request, claim or regard for worthiness [p 324]. Rumi supplies the verse "We were not, and there was no demand on our part", and later lines that make Hell's fire "an atom of God's wrath", a whip "to threaten the base", with the coolness of His clemency prior to it [p 324 to 325]. The hadith of the hundred parts, the captive mother who searches for her child and nurses him, and the Prophet's question whether she would throw him into the fire, end in the saying "God is more merciful to His servants than is this woman to her child" [p 324 to 325].
Alusi. Alusi's main concern is the logic of precedence. One divine attribute cannot precede or exceed another, since that would imply a beginning in God. So precedence must belong to mercy's connection with creatures: it reaches them earlier and more often, and "mercy" can mean the acts of mercy, which can be counted [p 327 to 328]. His Sufi allusions are the boldest in the chapter. Quoting Ibn 'Arabi, he says that after angels, prophets and believers intercede, the Most Merciful intercedes last; wrath races to its full extent only to find that mercy got there first [p 331]. The length of wrath equals the space in the Fatiha between the first "the Compassionate, the Merciful" and the second, so the whole world, with its praise in good times and bad, sits inside two mentions of mercy [p 331 to 332]. He distinguishes pure mercy (Paradise, from the name al-Rahim) from mercy mixed with pain, like a child's discipline or bitter medicine (from al-Rahman) [p 332]. He ends by saying there is mercy in every wrath but not wrath in every mercy, and that even Iblis will hope for mercy on the Day [p 332 to 333].
The Moderns: Mercy as Social Order and Inner Life
The Manar. Against Razi, 'Abduh and Rida argue that the question-and-answer form does not prove an undeniable truth (atheists have denied it); it states what the Meccans already accepted and draws out what they rejected: mercy and Resurrection [p 334 to 336]. The gathering is a mercy because it "precludes chaos, neglect and the condoning of injustice"; even awareness of it trains the soul [p 336].
They distinguish a requital built into every act by natural law, as health follows good habits, from one God adds as favour or justice; good deeds may be multiplied but evil is never punished beyond its measure (Q. 6:160) [p 337 to 339]. On losing one's soul, the Manar names two causes: blind imitation (taqlid), which wastes the intellect, and weakness of will, which keeps people from acting on what they know. It quotes the principle that a mujtahid who errs is better than an imitator who happens to be right [p 340 to 342]. The editors note that this is Sunni commentary upholding free will against Razi [p 302].
Fadl Allah. The Beirut scholar notes that the Qur'an asks questions because people who never question themselves never reflect [p 342 to 343]. Then comes the one restriction in the chapter: everyone may hope for mercy on the Day except those not linked to it by anything, the people who refuse belief and so lose the one basis for their salvation [p 345]. The editors soften this: it is the person who turns mercy down, not God who withholds it, since God respects human choice so much that He does not force even His mercy on anyone [p 302].
| Reading | Mercy is... | Main voices |
|---|---|---|
| Respite | Delaying punishment so that people may repent | Muqatil, Tabari, Tabrisi, Razi, Zajjaj |
| Judgement | A Day of reckoning that holds society back from chaos | Razi, Alusi, Manar, Fadl Allah |
| Existence | The outflow of being to each thing as it is ready | Kashani, Burusawi, Alusi's allusions |
| Portions | One of a hundred mercies now, ninety-nine kept for the Hereafter | Tabari, Razi, Abu Hayyan, Burusawi, Alusi |
| Intercession | God's own last intercession, emptying Hell | 'Ikrima via Tabari; Ibn 'Arabi via Alusi |
Table 20. Six answers to "what is the mercy in Q. 6:12?" [p 303 to 345].
Chapter 4. The Light Verse, Part One (Q. 24:35)
"God is the Light of the heavens and the earth." The verse goes on to a niche, a lamp, a glass like a glittering star, and an olive tree "neither of the east nor of the west" whose oil almost shines untouched by fire. The editors call it the most famous simile in the Qur'an and note that it sits, unexpectedly, in a Medinan sura full of law and ritual [p 347, 350]. This first half of the chapter follows the formative and classical voices from Muqatil to Zamakhshari, and the opening of Razi's long treatment [p 347 to 399].
The Editors' Map: One Simile, Five Referents
The introduction sorts the readings by what the "likeness of His light" refers to. Tabari's reports make the niche the believer's chest and the lamp the Qur'an and faith; Muqatil makes it Muhammad's light carried in his father's loins; a Shi'i report in Qummi makes the niche Fatima and "light upon light" the succession of imams [p 347 to 348]. Many commentators also take the olive tree literally for a moment: a tree that catches the sun from both directions gives the best oil, and the self-luminous oil becomes the Prophet's wisdom that shone before revelation touched it [p 348].
The Sufi line goes further. Maybudi cites the hadith that God created creatures in darkness and then sprinkled His light over them, and Burusawi reads that sprinkling as the gift of existence itself, so that light equals existence [p 349]. The philosophers bring a separate lineage: light as the agent of vision, Aristotle's agent intellect, and Suhrawardi's Illuminationism (ishraq), which recast Avicenna's Necessary Existent as a first, self-subsisting light. The editors think light won this role because people can experience it in a way they cannot experience "existence" or "essence" [p 349]. They also flag a surprise: Zamakhshari, the rationalist, writes what they call a veritably mystical reading of light as divine truth [p 349].
| What the light stands for | Main early voices | Who develops it later |
|---|---|---|
| Guidance to the people of heaven and earth | Ibn 'Abbas via Tabari; Muqatil's opening gloss | Razi (his preferred sense), Tabrisi |
| The Qur'an in the believer's heart | Hasan al-Basri, Ibn Zayd via Tabari | Tabari's own choice; Tabrisi's third opinion |
| The believer (heart, chest, deeds) | Ubayy b. Ka'b; Hud; al-Baqir in Qummi | Tabrisi's second opinion |
| Muhammad and his Abrahamic descent | Muqatil; Ka'b al-Ahbar via Tabari | Tabrisi, Maybudi's rhymed praise |
| Fatima, al-Hasan, al-Husayn and the imams | Qummi, Furat | Ja'far b. Mansur, Tabrisi (al-Rida report) |
| Obedience to God | Ibn 'Abbas (second report) via Tabari | Tabrisi's fifth reading |
| Truth, or being itself | Zamakhshari (truth) | Ghazali via Razi, Burusawi (existence) |
Table 21. The seven referents of "the likeness of His light" and where each first appears in this chapter [p 347 to 349, 350, 353 to 356, 359 to 361, 381 to 383].
The Formative Voices: Lineage, Heart and Household
Muqatil. The earliest commentator glosses "Light of the heavens and the earth" as the provider of guidance to all their inhabitants, then says the statement stops and God turns to describe His Prophet [p 350]. The parts map onto a genealogy. The niche is 'Abd Allah, Muhammad's father; the glass is Muhammad's body; the torch inside is his faith. When the glass was taken out, the niche went dark, because 'Abd Allah died before Islam [p 351 and n.2]. The glittering star is Venus or Jupiter; the blessed tree is Abraham; "neither of the east nor of the west" means Abraham prayed neither east like Christians nor west like Jews but towards the Ka'ba [p 351]. Oil that almost shines is Abraham's knowledge, or, in a report from Abu Salih, Muhammad almost uttering prophecy before inspiration. "Light upon light" is a prophet issuing from a prophet's loins [p 351]. The editors call the choice of glosses somewhat haphazard but see one firm aim: to show Islam as a return to Abraham's pure monotheism [p 350].
Hud. The Ibadi commentator moves the simile inside the believer. The niche, an Ethiopic word for a windowless recess, is the believer's chest; the lamp is the light in his heart; the glass is the pure heart itself [p 352]. He notes the two readings of the verb "kindled" (masculine, referring to the lamp; feminine, referring to the glass) [p 352]. The tree is neither east nor west because neither direction dominates it, or because it casts no shadow either way, or because the believer is neither Christian nor Jew [p 352 to 353]. Oil that almost shines is the believer's heart, which nearly recognises the truth before it is explained; when the truth arrives it becomes light upon light, the light of glass, oil and lamp together [p 353]. The editors hear a rationalist note here, close to the Mu'tazili and Imami idea that the heart knows good and evil innately [p 352, 353 n.12]. A footnote records the Zaydi imam al-Qasim insisting that God is not light at all, since light is perceptible and created; He illuminates [p 352 n.4].
Qummi. Three Twelver reports stack up. From Ja'far al-Sadiq: the niche is Fatima, the lamp al-Hasan and al-Husayn, the glittering star Fatima among the women of the earth, the tree Abraham, light upon light one imam after another [p 354]. From al-Baqir: a believer's version in which the niche is his inner self, the lantern his heart, the lamp the light God placed there, and light upon light one religious duty after another; the believer moves through five lights, his entering, leaving, knowledge, speech and path to Paradise [p 354]. When a follower says people keep speaking of a "likeness" of the Lord's light, al-Sadiq answers that God has no likeness and cites Q. 16:74 [p 354]. The third report is a long letter from the eighth imam al-Rida. The imams are God's trustees after Muhammad; they know the fates and genealogies of men; on the Day of Resurrection they hold fast to the Prophet, the Prophet seeks access to his Lord, and that means of access is light. Only then does the letter reach the verse: "Our likeness in the Book of God is as a niche" [p 355 to 356]. The editors note how far the report seems from the verse until this point, and how it binds salvation to walaya, loyalty to the imams [p 353 and n.23].
Furat. Furat's reports send the light along a chain of knowledge: from the Prophet's heart to the heart of 'Ali, from Abraham through Muhammad to 'Ali, neither Christian nor Jewish; the learned member of the Prophet's family almost speaks knowledge before being asked [p 357]. A footnote cites a modern version, without source, in which all twelve imams take one phrase each and Fatima loses her central place as the glittering star; the editors say little is known about it [p 358 n.36].
Tabari: Collecting, Then Choosing the Qur'an
Tabari's account falls into two unequal halves: a long one on the lamp and niche, and a shorter one on the tree, with little on the phrases after "light upon light" [p 359]. Only one occasion-of-revelation report appears, and it appears twice: the Jews asked Muhammad how God's light could escape from heaven, and God answered with this parable, which Ibn 'Abbas says is a parable of obedience [p 359, 361].
He sets out the options methodically. "Light" means guide (Ibn 'Abbas), manager of the heavens and earth (Mujahid), or literal illumination. "His light" means the believer, as in Ubayy b. Ka'b's variant reading "the likeness of the one who believes in Him"; Muhammad, as in Ka'b al-Ahbar's answer to Ibn 'Abbas; the Qur'an and God's guidance; or obedience [p 360 to 361]. The editors find it worth noting that Ibn 'Abbas, the traditional father of exegesis, here asks Ka'b, a scholar known for Jewish learning [p 362 n.49]. Ubayy's report gives the most memorable portrait: the believer stands between four supports, thankful when given, patient when tested, just when judging, truthful when speaking, like a living man walking among graves, with five lights in his words, actions, entering, leaving and end [p 362]. Ibn 'Abbas adds Abraham looking at the star and saying "This is my Lord" before anyone told him: guidance before knowledge, then guidance upon guidance once knowledge came [p 363].
For the niche itself Tabari reports a windowless recess, a lamp, the pillar a lamp stands on, or the chains it hangs from [p 364]. His own verdict: the verse is a parable of the Qur'an in the hearts of believers, and the niche is the hollow shaft that holds the wick [p 364 to 365]. On the tree he prefers the reading that it gets the sun both morning and evening, since that yields the best oil [p 366]. Then comes a personal step that no report supports: the lamp is lit from the blessed tree as the Qur'an is from God, so the tree points to God Himself, and "light upon light" is the Qur'an laid on top of the proofs of God's oneness He had already set up in creation [p 359, 366 to 367].
The Isma'ili Reading: Ten Domes and an Unborn Imam
Ja'far b. Mansur. The Fatimid author reads the verse in two registers [p 367]. First, a saying of Ja'far al-Sadiq: contemplating the verse, he saw ten domes of light, each ringed by a thousand more. Seven are the speaking prophets (nutaqa'), and three are ranks of the Isma'ili mission: the follower, the deputy and the gate. Whoever knows them knows God [p 367 to 368]. The author insists that "dome" means a covering for hidden knowledge, not a body in which God descends; he rejects both the Christian view of Jesus and the view of the extremists (ghulat, here the Nusayris) that God dwelt in the bodies of imams [p 368 and n.66]. The editors note that this dome vocabulary is unusual for Fatimid writing and may be pre-Fatimid [p 367 n.59].
Second, a household reading with a striking twist. God's light in heaven is His guidance; His light on earth is the imams. The niche is Fatima; the lamp is al-Husayn; the lamp in the glass is al-Husayn in her womb; oil that almost shines untouched by fire is al-Husayn announcing his imamate before birth and before any imam had designated him [p 369]. The olive names messengers and imams, the fig names legatees and proofs [p 369].
Maybudi: Lights in Degrees
Maybudi's third-level commentary is the chapter's most varied [p 369 to 370]. He starts with a definition: light is what illuminates something other than itself, so the sun and a lamp are light, but a mirror or a jewel is not [p 370]. A footnote sets this beside Ghazali's three kinds of visible things in the Mishkat al-anwar [p 370 n.69]. Outward light, sun and moon, will be eclipsed and rolled up on the Last Day; the inward light of oneness and mystical knowledge never sets. He quotes a couplet whose second line is "But the sun of hearts will never set" [p 371].
Inward light has grades. For ordinary believers: Islam with sincerity, faith with veracity, spiritual excellence (ihsan) with certainty. For the people of realisation: visionary insight with unveiling, rectitude with witnessing, oneness with nearness. Up to here the servant travels by his own effort; then divine attraction takes over, and all the lights unite, from majesty and beauty to the light of "He-ness". That is "light upon light", and only Muhammad holds every one of them [p 371 to 373].
Three narratives follow. The poor Emigrants, some so destitute they shield each other's nakedness, listen to a reciter; the Prophet joins their circle, their faces shine so that he cannot tell them apart, and he promises they will enter Paradise half a day, five hundred years, before the rich [p 373]. The sprinkling hadith becomes a rain of light falling on a handful of earth; stones become jewels, and the breast expands [p 373 to 374]. Then a captured Muslim scholar is singled out in a crowd of thirty thousand Byzantines by a bishop who sees the light of faith in his face. They trade riddles (the Paradise tree is like the sun's rays reaching every room), the bishop cannot answer what is written over Paradise's gate without abandoning his girdle and cross, and he and seventy converts are killed [p 375 to 376]. The moral is that one believer's light can shine out from among a crowd of deniers [p 376]. A final reading takes "His light" as Muhammad, whose face, eyes, tongue and hands each carry a named light, and two Arabic passages from Hallaj via Sulami close the section [p 377 to 378].
| Stage | Light | Paired with |
|---|---|---|
| Way of the law (all believers) | Islam | Sincerity |
| Faith | Veracity | |
| Spiritual excellence | Certainty | |
| Way of realisation (the elite) | Visionary insight | Unveiling |
| Rectitude | Witnessing | |
| Oneness | Nearness | |
| Divine attraction | All lights united, ending in the light of "He-ness"; only the Prophet holds all of them | |
Table 22. Maybudi's ladder of inward lights [p 371 to 373].
Zamakhshari: Light as Truth, Seen with the Intellect
Zamakhshari reads "God is the Light" the way one might call a generous man generosity itself: a noun used for emphasis, meaning that God is the possessor of light. That light is truth, likened to light because it is manifest, as in Q. 2:257 where God brings believers out of darkness into light [p 378 to 379]. The parable's parts become physics: Syrian glass, a lamp kept in a narrow niche so its light is concentrated rather than scattered, pure oil from the best olives, those of Syria [p 379 to 380]. "Light upon light" means compound light, strengthened as far as possible [p 379]. Then the Mu'tazili point: God guides to this light whoever looks with the eye of his intellect and judges fairly; whoever does not look is like a blind man for whom night and noon are the same [p 380]. The editors read this as a quiet defence of free will: the path is open to anyone who wants it [p 378].
Tabrisi: The Compiler's Five Options
Tabrisi lists three senses of "Light" (guide; illuminator by sun, moon and stars; adorner of heaven with angels and earth with prophets and scholars) and five of "His light" (belief in the heart, the Qur'an, Muhammad, the proof of God's unity and justice, and obedience) [p 380 to 381]. He explains why the olive was chosen: oil for lamps, tanning, fuel, ash for washing silk; it was the first tree after the Flood and grows in the homeland of the prophets [p 381]. Then come four household and lineage readings, including al-Rida's and one from Ibn Babawayh in which the light of knowledge passes from the Prophet's chest to 'Ali's, and each imam is fortified by it until the Hour [p 382 to 383]. Tabrisi's own synthesis draws a tree whose trunk is prophethood, bough the imamate, branches revelation, leaves interpretation, guarded by Gabriel and Michael [p 383]. On guidance he gives the Twelver and Mu'tazili answer: God guides by a grace (lutf) that inclines a person to choose belief [p 384].
Razi, Part One: Why Physical Light Cannot Be God
Razi organises his account in parts [p 384]. He first gives six arguments that sensible light cannot be God: it is divisible and so dependent; it comes and goes with the sun; it moves; it needs bodies; and if eternal it could neither move nor rest [p 385 to 386]. This refutes the Manicheans, who held God to be the greatest light [p 386]. "Like Him there is nothing" (Q. 42:11) rules it out too, since all lights resemble one another [p 386]. He solves the apparent clash between "God is the Light" and "the likeness of His light" with the same example of a man called generosity itself, and prefers, with Ibn 'Abbas, the sense of guide [p 386 to 387].
He then reports Ghazali's Mishkat al-anwar, which claims there is no light except God, and promises to judge it fairly [p 388]. Ghazali lists seven ways the intellect outshines the eye; Razi expands them to twenty: the intellect knows itself, grasps universals, builds knowledge on knowledge, holds many things at once, grows stronger after forty, sees inside things, is not limited by distance or direction, and judges the errors of sight, as when a moving ship seems still and the shore seems to move [p 388 to 394].
The ladder that follows carries the light upward. The Qur'an is to the mind what the sun is to the eye; the Prophet's soul gives light to other souls without receiving it from any human; prophets receive from angels; angels are graded, with givers above receivers [p 394 to 395]. Razi's analogy is sunlight bouncing from the moon to a mirror, to a second mirror, to a basin of water, to the ceiling, each dimmer than the last [p 395]. Since everything other than God is possible in itself and so, considered alone, non-existent, and non-existence is darkness, everything except God is dark and lit only by Him; God alone is light, and other things are light only by metaphor [p 395 to 396]. Why then is God hidden? Because His light never sets: we learn that light differs from colour only at sunset, and divine light has no sunset [p 397]. Razi accepts the argument, adding that it does not contradict the commentators' sense of "guide" [p 398].
Part Two explains the hadith of God's seventy (or seven hundred, or seven thousand) veils of light and darkness. Those veiled by pure darkness are absorbed in bodily concerns; those veiled by mixed light and darkness credit nature, the stars or matter with the self-sufficiency that belongs to God; those veiled by pure light stop at one stage of knowing God's attributes, and since the stages are endless, the servant is always moving [p 398 to 399]. Part Three begins on comparison itself: why a lamp in a niche and not the sun? Because God's guidance is a perfect light shining amid darkness, the darkness of most people's vague beliefs, while the sun fills the world entirely or leaves it entirely dark [p 399].
Figure 60. Razi's descending ladder of light, after Ghazali, with his sun and mirror analogy [p 394 to 399].
| Commentator | "Neither of the east nor of the west" means |
|---|---|
| Muqatil, Tabrisi (lineage reading) | Abraham prayed neither east (Christians) nor west (Jews), but to the Ka'ba |
| Hud, Tabari, Zamakhshari | Sunlit morning and evening, so its oil is the finest |
| Hasan al-Basri via Tabari and Tabrisi | Not a tree of this world at all; a parable |
| Ibn Zayd via Tabrisi; Zamakhshari | A tree of Syria, between east and west |
| Dahhak via Tabrisi | Meccan, since Mecca is the centre of the world |
| Furat; Ja'far b. Mansur | The pure creed of Abraham passed to Muhammad and the imams |
Table 23. One phrase, six readings of the olive tree's position [p 351, 352 to 353, 363, 365 to 366, 369, 379, 382].
Chapter 4. The Light Verse, Part Two (Q. 24:35)
The second half of the chapter finishes Razi and then follows the verse through the Sufi metaphysicians, the grammarian Abu Hayyan, the late Ottoman and Iraqi compilers, and two twentieth-century voices. Two trends dominate: light comes to mean existence itself, and the parts of the lamp become a map of the human mind [p 400 to 453].
Razi, Concluded: Ten Readings and a Map of the Mind
Razi's third part explains why each piece of the lamp matters to the image of perfect light: a lamp in a niche concentrates its beams, as a lamp in a small house seems brighter than in a large one; clear glass reflects rays back and forth; olive oil is the clearest fuel; a tree exposed to the sun on every side gives the clearest oil [p 399 to 400]. He then lists ten readings of "His light": guidance (the majority of theologians and al-Baqillani), the Qur'an, the Messenger, faith in the believer's heart, and four psychological or genealogical schemes [p 400 to 404].
Two of these schemes map the parts of the verse onto the mind. Ghazali's version takes five powers of perception: sense, imagination, reason, reflection and the prophetic or divine faculty. Imagination is the glass, because it is made of dense stuff yet clear enough to pass light and shields the flame from gusts; reflection is the olive tree, because it splits ideas and makes the fruit of one inference the seed of the next; the prophetic faculty is the oil that shines untouched [p 401 to 403]. Ibn Sina's version runs through stages of the intellect, from the empty "material intellect" (the niche) through acquired and active intellect to the angelic active intellect, which is the fire [p 403 to 404]. A Sufi reading makes the chest the niche, the heart the glass and knowledge the lamp, lit from the angels [p 404]. Razi's own preference stays with guidance, because the previous verse speaks of "signs making all clear" [p 404 to 405].
His fourth part settles smaller issues. Some commentators think the verse is inverted, since the source of light is the lamp, not the niche [p 405]. On the olive tree Razi rejects three readings with practical arguments. A tree of Paradise is useless as an image, since nobody has seen one. "Syria lies between east and west" fails because on a round earth every place has its own east and west. A tree shaded by other trees would not fruit, since olives need sun. He prefers Ibn 'Abbas's tree on a high place catching sun both morning and evening [p 406]. On "God guides to His light whom He will" he reports the Mu'tazili al-Jubba'i, for whom ignorance comes from the ignorant person since the evidence is clear, and replies for the Ash'aris: the verse says the clearest proofs are not enough without God's choice. He finds 'Abd al-Jabbar's counter-reply weaker still, since it cannot account for children and the mad [p 407 to 408].
Kashani: The Lamp as the Human Soul
Kashani reads the verse in the vocabulary of Ibn 'Arabi's school, with light as an equivalent for existence [p 409]. Light is what is manifest in itself and makes other things manifest; God, existing and manifest by Himself, manifests the heavens of spirits and the earth of bodies [p 409 to 410]. The niche is the body, dark in itself until lit by the spirit; the glass is the heart; the tree is the holy soul, whose branches reach from the earth of the body to the heaven of the spirit [p 410 to 411]. It is an olive because its knowledge is partial, the way an olive is not all oil. It is neither east nor west because the soul stands between the west of bodies, where divine light sets, and the east of spirits, where it rises [p 411]. Its oil is its readiness; the fire is the active intellect; "light upon light" is acquired perfection laid upon innate readiness [p 411 to 412].
A long footnote gives Ja'far al-Sadiq's list of forty-odd lights, as transmitted by Sulami, ending with the light of He-ness, complete only in the Prophet [p 409 n.139]. Another gives Tustari's lamp: its candle is gnosis, its wick the religious duties, its oil sincerity [p 410 n.142].
Abu Hayyan: What Kind of Comparison?
The grammarian lists the glosses (guide, director, illuminator, adorner, one free of every defect) and notes the variant reading nawwara, "He illuminated", which makes God the agent [p 412 to 413]. His real question is the type of comparison. Is it whole to whole, God's light compared in its entirety to the brightest light people know? Or part to part, with niche, glass, lamp and tree each matched to something [p 414]? He supplies the part-to-part maps for the Prophet and for the believer and notes that the Qur'an reading does not fit as neatly, since faith cannot be a niche [p 414]. He rejects Zamakhshari's restriction to Syrian glass because the verse says no such thing [p 415]. He reports the other readings of the olive tree, including Ibn 'Umar's that it is Abraham's community, neither Jewish nor Christian, and the saying that Islam is neither severe nor lax [p 415]. He uses the verse to state the Basran and Kufan positions on explanatory apposition [p 412, 416].
Burusawi: Light Is Existence
Burusawi opens with Ghazali's definition of the name "The Light": the Manifest One through whom everything is made manifest. Since nothing is darker than non-existence, existence is light flowing from God's essence; every existent points to its maker the way every ray points to the sun [p 417]. Najm al-Din Razi's Ta'wilat agrees but calls the phrase a rhetorical simile. Burusawi, speaking of himself as "the fakir", disagrees: "Light" is one of God's most beautiful names, and its use for Him is real, not figurative [p 417 to 418]. The sprinkling hadith means that God first determined creatures in darkness and then gave them existence [p 418].
He distinguishes four lights: the sun's light, which reveals things but cannot see; the eye's light, which reveals and sees; the intellect's light, which reveals what is hidden by ignorance; and God's light, which brings non-existent things into existence and sees them in existence as He saw them in His knowledge [p 418]. Persian verses carry the argument: the whole cosmos is found through His light, but where is He made clear by the cosmos [p 419]?
He gathers a crowd of other readings. The Ottoman Sufi Uftada learned by unveiling that "light" here means knowledge [p 420]. Ruzbihan Baqli makes the heavens and earth the believer's head and body, with the senses as planets [p 420]. Sam'ani makes the light Muhammad, the niche Adam, the glass Noah, the olive Abraham; "the father is light and the son is luminous" [p 425]. Qushayri distinguishes light gained by effort from light given by grace [p 425]. The Ta'wilat al-Najmiyya gives two readings, one for the many and one for the elect. For the many, the niche is the world of bodies, the glass the Throne, the lamp the Seat; for the elect, the body is the niche, the heart the glass, and the innermost secret the lamp, polished by "there is no god but God" until the believer reaches the station of "I am his eyes and ears" [p 425 to 427]. Qunawi closes: the relative light spread through things guides to the absolute light, and in perfect realisation God is His own guide. The section's last words are "Only God knows God" [p 428 to 429].
He also gives the lamp-rather-than-sun answer that Razi gave: a lamp shows perfect light amid darkness, which is what guidance does among people's illusions [p 424]. "Light upon light" means multiplied light, the way "dirham upon dirham" means many dirhams, not two [p 423].
| Element | Ghazali via Razi (powers) | Ibn Sina via Razi and Alusi (intellect) | Kashani and the Najmiyya (spiritual anatomy) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Niche | Sense perception | Material intellect, empty but ready | The body |
| Glass | Imagination | Intellect in habitu | The heart |
| Lamp | Reason | Intellect in act | The spirit, or the innermost secret |
| Olive tree | Reflection | Reflection | The holy soul |
| Oil that almost shines | Prophetic faculty | Intuition and the sacred faculty | Readiness, or the human spirit |
| Fire | (not assigned) | Active intellect | Active intellect, or the light of eternity |
Table 24. Three psychological maps of the lamp [p 401 to 404, 410 to 412, 426 to 427, 440 to 442].
Alusi: The Anthologist's Verdict
Alusi gathers almost everything [p 429]. He begins with language: diya' (radiance) belongs to a thing in itself, while nur (light) is what falls on it from a source, which is why the Qur'an calls the sun a radiance and the moon a light (Q. 10:5) [p 429 to 430]. The Illuminationist view treats light as identical to existence, graded from the Necessary Light of lights down to bodies whose light is mixed with the darkness of contingency [p 430 and n.198]. Applying the physical or philosophical sense of light to God is wrong, he says, because God is beyond body and quality. But a group including Ghazali does apply the third sense, what is manifest in itself and makes other things manifest. Alusi quotes the Mishkat at length: existence and light are synonyms; anything that borrows its existence is, in itself, pure non-existence; calling anything but the first Light "light" is purely figurative [p 430 to 431]. He labels this the Sufi approach, recalling that for Sufis "There is no god but God" is the oneness of the many and "There is no god but He" the oneness of the elect, a degree beyond reason [p 432]. The editors note that one of his Ghazali quotations uses a phrase more typical of Ibn 'Arabi's school, suggesting either influence or a different manuscript [p 431 n.203].
His own preference is that God illuminates heaven and earth with the signs of creation and revelation that point to His existence and oneness, which ties the verse to the previous one about "signs making all clear" [p 433 to 434]. The simile, he says, is intellectual: God's light is His proofs [p 437]. He gives the Prophetic map in detail. The chest is the niche, opened twice, in childhood and on the Night Journey, with two faces: one takes light from the heart and the other pours it on humanity. The heart is the glass, the Qur'an the tree, the Prophet's readiness the oil that would shine before revelation touched it [p 437 to 439]. A wine-and-glass couplet describes the point where vessel and content can no longer be told apart [p 439].
He then sets out Ibn Sina's five-faculty and four-intellect schemes carefully, notes that their order does not match the verse, and closes with a verse of his own choosing against a folk "diseased" by Ibn Sina's The Cure, who died in Aristotle's religion [p 440 to 443]. The philosophers, he says, are blind to the light of the Law [p 443]. The last phrases of the verse are a promise to those who ponder the similitudes and a threat to those who ignore them [p 444].
The Modern Voices: Meaning for Us, Meaning for God
Mawdudi. The Pakistani reformer starts with the hypocrites of the surrounding verses: people who profess faith but are blind to the light now shining from the Qur'an and the Prophet, Muslims only on official records [p 445]. Light is what is apparent in itself and makes other things apparent. It is not to be taken literally as a ray travelling at 186,000 miles per second; God sees without eyes and hears without ears, and to restrict light to rays striking the retina is, in the translation's words, "sheer narrow-mindedness" [p 445 to 446]. God alone is self-apparent; everything else is darkness until He invests it with light [p 446]. His most original move: the lamp is God, the niche creation, and the lamp's glass a veil that hides God not by darkness but by intense visibility. We see only lights that flicker and have opposites; absolute light, which never ceases, is beyond weak creatures [p 447]. The tree, its position and its oil are not separate elements, only intensifiers of the lamp. God is called Light the way a very generous person is called generosity itself [p 447 to 448]. God shows His light only to sincere seekers, not to people absorbed in worldly comfort [p 449]. The editors note his tacit borrowing from his Sufi heritage and his care to keep both divine agency and human responsibility [p 447 n.250, 448 n.254, 449 n.255].
Fadl Allah. The Lebanese Twelver scholar reproduces much of the same argument about rays and absolute meanings almost word for word, and adds Tabataba'i's view that God alone exists in His own right and so is most fitting to be called light. God, he concludes, is the "cause of manifestation" in the universe [p 449 to 450]. He then tests the readings against the verse's context and rejects them all as not fitting its drift. Because the verse ends on guidance, he takes "light" to mean the guidance built into creation, by which heaven and earth move safely towards their goals, and the revelation by which people are meant to move the same way [p 451 to 453]. The editors find it striking that he cites no traditional Shi'i readings, which they take as an ecumenical choice [p 453 n.261].
Figure 67. How literally "God is the Light" is meant: four positions across the chapter [p 352 n.4, 360, 378 to 379, 386 to 387, 397 to 398, 409 to 410, 412 to 413, 417 to 418, 428 to 432, 445 to 450].
| Commentator | Why a lamp and not the sun? |
|---|---|
| Razi (theologians' view) | Guidance is perfect light amid the darkness of people's vague beliefs; the sun leaves all light or all dark |
| Burusawi | Same answer, applied to the Qur'an among creatures' illusions |
| Zamakhshari, Abu Hayyan, Alusi | A lamp enclosed in a niche concentrates its light; nothing more could be added |
| Mawdudi | Picture the brightest lamp you know; the details only intensify that image |
| Fadl Allah | The mind can only picture the unseen through material images |
Table 25. The question of scale: why the verse chooses a small light [p 379 to 380, 399, 416, 424, 437, 447, 452].
| Phase | Typical reading of "His light" | Typical tools |
|---|---|---|
| Formative (Muqatil to Furat) | A person or a line of persons: Abraham to Muhammad, or Fatima and the imams | Genealogy, reports from imams and Companions |
| Classical (Tabari to Tabrisi) | Guidance, the Qur'an, the believer's heart | Report collection, grammar, variant readings |
| Philosophical and Sufi (Razi, Kashani, Burusawi) | Existence, intellect, the soul's stages | Avicennan psychology, Ghazali, Ibn 'Arabi |
| Late compilers (Alusi) | God's proofs; the Prophet's heart | Anthology of earlier views, guarded against philosophy |
| Modern (Mawdudi, Fadl Allah) | God's absolute light; guidance built into creation | Language theory, popular science, ethical appeal |
Table 26. How the referent of the light shifts across thirteen centuries [p 347 to 453].
Chapter 5. The Measure (Q. 54:49)
"Surely We have created everything in measure." Six Arabic words carry the oldest argument in Islamic theology: does God's measuring of all things include the measuring of human choices? The chapter follows fourteen commentators from a one-line gloss on Hell to a modern Shi'i scholar's claim that choice itself is part of the measure [p 455 to 489].
The Problem Behind the Verse
The editors frame the chapter with an argument shared across the monotheisms of the Near East. If God knows from eternity what will happen, it must happen that way, or His knowledge would be wrong; so it seems every fate is fixed. Philosophers later argued that foreknowledge need not cause events, but the worry came first [p 455]. Early in the second/eighth century a movement called the Qadariyya defended human freedom without denying God's knowledge or power. (Confusingly, the "Qadaris" are named after qadar because they claimed the power of choice for humans.) They were absorbed into the Mu'tazila, and the traditionalists, especially the Hanbalis, opposed them fiercely; from the fourth/tenth century theology was defined by that quarrel [p 455 to 456].
The editors trace a clear arc. Muqatil shows no interest in predestination at all, which suggests the controversy was only beginning in the mid-second century. Hud and Tabari fight it with hadith, and Tabari is the last to do so mainly through reports that brand deniers of the decree as unbelievers. From Maybudi onward the argument moves to the divine will (irada), to the Ash'ari theory of "acquisition", and to grammar. In the twentieth century the opponent changes: the enemy is no longer the free-will theologian but the idea of chance [p 456 to 459].
A second pair of terms runs through the chapter. Qada' is usually the general, pre-eternal decree ("all people die"); qadar the particular decree worked out in time ("this person dies here, then"). Razi and Abu Hayyan put it as knowledge against will: qada' is what is in God's knowledge, qadar what is in His will [p 457, 466 n.40, 476 to 478, 482 n.107].
The Early Reports: Measure as Fate
Muqatil reads the verse only in its context, the sinners dragged into Hell in the verses before it: God has decreed for them punishment and entry into Saqar. Given his view that only those who reject God's oneness stay in Hell forever, the target is the hardened unbeliever. The editors note he held predestinarian views elsewhere, citing the story of God spreading Adam's progeny in His hand and fixing their fates [p 459].
Hud, the Ibadi, shows a school changing sides. The early Ibadis, rooted in rationalist Basra and linked to al-Hasan al-Basri, were relaxed about free will; by the third imam they favoured determinism [p 460]. Hud's reports drive the point home. 'Ali touches his index finger to his tongue and then to his thumb: even this is measured. A believer must believe in four things, ending with belief in the measure. Nobody tastes faith until he knows that what struck him could not have missed him, and what missed him could not have struck him. The long "hadith of Gabriel" lists belief in the measure, good and evil, as part of faith. Ibn Mas'ud says every relapse into unbelief began with denying the measure; the Prophet fears for his community unjust rulers, belief in the stars, and denial of the measure; Salman warns against saying "if only so-and-so had not..." [p 460 to 462].
Qummi, like most early Shi'i traditionists, reads the verse deterministically: everything has a time, a fixed length and a term. Ja'far al-Sadiq finds the believers in free will named in scripture: the verse just before calls the criminals people "in error and madness". The editors see an internal Shi'i polemic here against figures such as Zurara who defended human capacity [p 462 to 463].
Tabari paraphrases (everything is created by a measure God has decreed and ordained) and then piles up occasions of revelation: the polytheists of Quraysh argued with the Prophet about qadar, and the verse came down as a rebuke. One report softens the picture. When a man asked what action is for if all is concluded, the Prophet answered: act, for each person is eased toward that for which he was created, citing Q. 92:7 and 92:10. Ibn 'Abbas adds that God created good and evil in measure. Tabari ends with a short note on the vowel of kull, agreeing with the second grammarian he cites and offering little of his own [p 463 to 464].
| Report | Who cites it | Point |
|---|---|---|
| The finger on the tongue and thumb | Hud | Even trivial movements are measured |
| Four articles of faith ending in the measure | Hud, Burusawi | Belief in qadar is a condition of faith |
| What struck you could not have missed you | Hud (from 'Ali and Salman) | No room for "if only" |
| Hadith of Gabriel | Hud | The measure, good and evil, belongs to the definition of faith |
| Quraysh dispute about qadar | Tabari, Alusi | The verse answers deniers of the decree |
| "Act, for each is eased" | Tabari | Deeds still matter inside the decree |
| Measures written 50,000 years before creation | Burusawi | The decree precedes the world |
| Deniers of qadar are the community's Magians | Alusi | Polemic against the Qadariyya |
Table 27. The hadith arsenal of the measure verse [p 460 to 464, 482 to 485].
Maybudi: Austere Decree, Tender Ending
Maybudi's mystical layer takes qadar only as decree, though his Persian rendering and exoteric layer allow "measure and knowledge" [p 465]. He opens against the Qadaris, Mu'tazila and Kharijis, who say God gives humans the tools and power and then commands, so that the servant creates his own acts and God has a partner in creation. Against them stands the Sunni formula: good and bad acts are willed and preordained by God but acquired by the servant, who is rewarded or punished for them [p 465].
Then comes the sober core: what happens today is not your will but a pre-eternal act now made manifest. On one person God sets the seal of grace, so his acceptance exceeds his deeds and his forgiveness exceeds his sin; on another the brand of justice, so his punishment exceeds his crime [p 466]. The editors' note supplies the Sunni rule behind it: reward is pure grace, punishment pure justice [p 466 n.44]. Then the tone turns. "Seek nothing from Him but Him", for Iblis, banished, asked for something and was given the world but not God. Whoever loses God has found nothing, even with everything; whoever finds Him has found everything, even with nothing. The passage closes with God's voice: you were not, and I was there for you; I saw you cast down and lifted you; would I cast down one I have lifted [p 467]? The editors' introduction reads this as the classic Ash'ari pairing of creation and acquisition, followed by a turn to reliance on God (tawakkul) [p 457].
The Rationalists: Measure as Design
Zamakhshari gives two readings side by side. Either everything is created in measure, precisely and in ordered arrangement, as wisdom requires; or it is created by a decree written on the Tablet and known before it exists, because "We already knew its state" and its duration [p 457, 468]. The editors' note draws the Mu'tazili moral: the stress falls on God's knowledge, and knowledge is not in itself causative [p 468 n.52].
Tabrisi goes further toward design. Everything was created to a measure set by wisdom, "neither haphazardly nor randomly"; even punishment is created "according to the measure of merit". Al-Jubba'i's example is the body: tongue for speech, hand for striking, leg for walking, eye for sight, and any excess or lack would defeat the purpose. Al-Hasan adds the pairing of fitting things, woman for man, men's clothes for men. Tabrisi does mention the Preserved Tablet and an unalterable ordinance, but uses them to affirm wisdom, not compulsion [p 468 to 469]. The editors note that divine punishment, on this reading, never exceeds the sin, and their long footnote adds that suffering is not to be equated with punishment, citing the undeserved sufferings of the prophets, imams and Christ [p 458 n.7].
Razi: Grammar as a Weapon
Razi's commentary is the chapter's longest and most technical [p 469 to 476].
First, context. The verse belongs with "Taste now the touch of Saqar!" before it and God's single word of command after it; creation (khalq) and command (amr) are paired as in Q. 7:54, "His are the creation and the command". So the verse is a reply to those who deny that God creates everything [p 469 to 471].
Second, the vowel. Read kulla (accusative), the majority reading, the sentence means "We created everything, in measure", and since human acts are "things", they are created by God, which refutes the Mu'tazila. Read kullu (nominative), the verb "We created it" could become a description of "thing", so that the verse says only that whatever God created is in measure, leaving room for things God did not create, such as human acts. Razi argues that the nominative still works against his opponents, since an indefinite "everything" carries comprehensive meaning. He also concedes, with remarkable candour, that if the implied verb were "We measured" instead of "We created", the verse would not refute the Mu'tazila at all; the decisive text is then "God is the Creator of everything" (Q. 13:16, 39:62) [p 471 to 473]. The editors call his method elaborate and ingenious: he takes the opponents' terms and turns them, sometimes inconsistently [p 472 n.67].
Third, meanings of qadar. As "measure", bodies and their qualities are measured, and all temporal things have finite duration; God, though named by attributes, is excluded from "everything" the way a speaker who says he saw everyone in the house is not among those seen [p 473 to 474]. As "measurement", it means God creates as He decrees, unlike an archer whose arrow lands where he did not fix it, and unlike the philosophers' God who acts by His essence while variety comes from the receptacles. So God can make the small large, which the editors read as his occasionalism [p 469, 475]. As the partner of qada', Razi rejects the philosophers' split (fire is hot by qada'; burning old cotton is qadar) and gives his own: qada' in God's knowledge, qadar in His will [p 475 to 476].
Figure 73. One vowel, two theologies: how the case of kull was made to carry the free-will debate [p 464 n.32, 471 to 480, 485 to 486].
Abu Hayyan and Sharafi: Two Grammarians, Opposite Aims
Abu Hayyan reports that Abu'l-Sammal and some Sunnis read the nominative, and that grammarians pick the accusative to make clear the verb is not a description. He states the dispute flatly: Sunnis say everything is created by God's power; Qadaris prefer the nominative, so that only what God created is measured. He quotes Zamakhshari's two readings in full, lists three senses of qadar (measure, measurement, partner of qada'), and ends by glossing "in measure" as "through power with will" [p 476 to 478]. The editors see a determinist trying to keep a place for human agency [p 476].
Sharafi, the Zaydi, uses the same tools in the opposite direction. Drawing on Abu'l-Fath al-Daylami, he reads "in measure" as specific measure, wisdom and calculation, and argues that even with the accusative, "We created it" can still be a relative clause, so the verse gives no proof for compulsion (jabr); he judges the opposing claim of the grammarian Ibn al-Hajib untenable, a judgement he credits to the Zaydi imam al-Mansur bi'llah [p 478 to 479]. He reports the marginalia of al-Sayyid al-'Alawi, where the compulsionist pictures man as a tree moved by the winds, and an adjudication that the seven readings agreed on the accusative because the nominative might suggest things not created by God. Sharafi's own last word dissolves the fight: "everything" means every created thing in either case, because God has not created all the infinite possibilities that can be called "things"; so the two readings mean the same [p 479 to 480].
| Commentator | School | Preferred sense of qadar | Use of grammar | Human acts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muqatil | Early traditionist | Decree of Hell for unbelievers | None | Not discussed |
| Hud | Ibadi | Fate, by hadith | None | Preordained |
| Qummi | Early Twelver | Term and length of all things | None | Free-will advocates are "criminals" |
| Tabari | Sunni traditionist | Decree, with deeds still counting | Brief vowel note | Inside fate, eased by deeds |
| Maybudi | Sunni Sufi | Decree | None | Created by God, acquired by servant |
| Zamakhshari | Mu'tazili | Design or foreknown decree | Notes both readings | Leans to nominative (per Sharafi) |
| Tabrisi | Twelver | Wise design; just measure of punishment | None | Implicitly free |
| Razi | Ash'ari | Decree in God's will | Accusative proves sole creatorship | Created by God |
| Abu Hayyan | Grammarian | Power with will | Sets out both camps | Determined, agency retained |
| Sharafi | Zaydi | Wisdom and calculation | Either reading avoids jabr | Not compelled |
| Burusawi | Ottoman Sufi | Pre-eternal decree via archetypes | Circumstantial clause | Determined, still responsible |
| Alusi | Late Sunni | Preordained, written on the Tablet | Defends accusative | Deniers condemned |
| Mawdudi | Modern Sunni | Fixed term against chance | None | Not raised |
| Fadl Allah | Modern Twelver | Law and order of existence | None | Choice is part of qadar |
Table 28. Fourteen readings of the measure [p 459 to 489].
Burusawi and Alusi: The Late Synthesis
Burusawi takes "in measure" as form, figure and qualities shaped by wisdom, so that each benefit depends on a thing's particular nature, or as an unalterable decree on the Tablet. He quotes a Persian couplet: God has decided the matter and the pen is dry; what has come from the pen, the pen cannot change [p 481 to 482]. Following Ibn 'Arabi, qada' is the existence of all creatures together on the Tablet and qadar their existence in the archetypes once their conditions are met; that is why it is called "creation", tied to a set time [p 482]. He adds hadiths (the measures written fifty thousand years before the heavens; everything by decree, "even impotence and acuity") and the Ta'wilat al-Najmiyya: each thing receives exactly what its pre-eternal receptivity requires, neither more nor less [p 482 to 483]. He closes with Ghazali's famous saying that nothing in possibility is more wonderful than this existence, since otherwise God would be miserly or powerless; the editors explain the "best of all possible worlds" controversy and Ghazali's apparent principle of plenitude [p 483 and n.116].
Alusi reads the verse as preordination on the Tablet and gathers the harshest anti-Qadari material in the chapter: the Prophet's saying that the Murji'a and Qadariyya have no share in Islam; Ibn 'Abbas's loathing of the Qadaris and his threat to throttle one; "fornication is by qadar"; the saying that the deniers of qadar are the Magians of this community, not to be visited when sick or mourned when dead [p 484 to 485]. The editors suspect the target is the Mu'tazila, and in a note detect anti-Shi'i feeling in the Ottoman context [p 484, 485 n.123]. Grammatically he sides with the accusative, reporting al-Radi's view that the readings agree and al-Sayyid al-Sanad's objection that only the accusative rules out uncreated things from the words themselves [p 485 to 486].
The Moderns: From Free Will to Chance
Mawdudi reads the verse cosmologically. Nothing is created by chance; everything comes into being at a set time, takes a form, develops toward an end and ceases on schedule. The world itself "will not end an hour earlier" than its appointed time, nor last an hour longer; it is neither eternal nor "a child's toy" to be destroyed at will [p 487]. The editors read the targets as secular chance-based cosmology and the Avicennan eternal world, and note that, typically of modernist writing, he does not take the verse as determining human agency [p 487].
Fadl Allah gives every existent, small or large, a precise law for its material and spiritual progress. "There is no random event" in the movement of existence; the order of the universe produces in scientists the sense that behind every phenomenon is a wisdom [p 488]. Qadar also governs individuals and societies, and choice is one of its elements: God's power means He defines the movement of existence and its conditions, so "choice is part of this measure" [p 489]. The editors call him a compatibilist: people are determined to choose, but their choices are not determined [p 488 n.136, 489]. Research therefore leads to faith: God "ordains and then guides" (Q. 87:3) [p 489].
Chapter 6. Oneness (Q. 112)
"Say: He is God, One, God, the Self-sufficient Besought of all, He neither begot nor was begotten, nor is there anyone equal to Him." Four short verses, recited by nearly every Muslim and stamped on coins of the first/seventh century, earlier than any securely dated Qur'an manuscript, draw some of the longest commentary in the volume. The chapter follows sixteen commentators from a story about a Bedouin chief who wanted a share of power to a modern scholar who calls this the creed a child and a philosopher can both hold [p 491 to 575].
The Editors' Map
The editors note three threads. First, the distinction between ahad and wahid: roughly, an internal oneness (God is undivided in Himself) against an external one (God is the only one of His kind). The first verse states the first; the last verse states incomparability. Ibn Mas'ud and al-A'mash are reported to have read al-wahid in place of ahad [p 492]. Second, the ladder of terms in verse one: Razi reads "He", "God" and "One" as levels, from an undifferentiated essence through God as Lord over existing creation to the reuniting of the many in the One; Kashani makes "He" the essence without attributes and "God" the essence with all its attributes, the difference being only in the mind [p 493].
Third, al-samad. Most commentators make it the ultimate lord to whom all turn. But Muqatil, Furat, Tabari, Abu Hatim, Razi and Abu Hayyan also cite "one with no cavity", and the editors press a question none of them answers: if God is solid and nothing is outside Him, where is creation located [p 494]? Maybudi drops the image; Zamakhshari stresses dependence: creatures cannot do without Him, "but He is independent of them"; Tabrisi limits "no cavity" to meaning the Living needs no food, drink or sleep; and Kashani finally places creation inside God: "what lacks absolute being is pure nothingness" [p 494 to 495].
The Story Behind the Sura
Muqatil tells the fullest story. 'Amir b. al-Tufayl offers to convert if he may rule the Bedouins while the Prophet rules the towns, then asks to be successor, then to be preferred over the Companions; the Prophet refuses each time ("no bargaining" in entering Islam) and offers only brotherhood with poor Companions such as Bilal and Salman. 'Amir threatens a thousand horsemen; Gabriel promises a thousand angels for each, with necks a year's walk long. When 'Amir returns with al-Arbad to kill the Prophet, an angel wrings al-Arbad's stomach, and 'Amir asks: what is your Lord's name, how big is He, what does He eat, whose father is He, who is His friend? Each verse answers a question; al-samad answers "what does He eat", since it means one who neither eats nor drinks. Al-Arbad is later killed by lightning, and 'Amir dies of a swelling in the house of a woman of Salul [p 495 to 498]. A second occasion has the polytheists ask whether God is made of gold or silver, iron or brass, while the Jews claim Ezra as God's son and the Christians Jesus; the sura denies all such claims [p 498 to 499].
Hud keeps to the names: ahad means wahid; al-samad is the Enduring, or the one of ultimate glory and sovereignty, or (in al-Kalbi's lost commentary) the one who neither eats nor drinks; the occasion is a request to give God's lineage [p 499 to 500]. Qummi has the Jews ask for God's lineage. Ahad means singular in attribute, as the Prophet put it: light with no darkness in it and knowledge with no ignorance. In a report from Ibn 'Abbas, God is not divisible, not partitioned, not subject to "how", number, increase or decrease, and He did not beget Ezra, Jesus, the sun, moon and stars, or the angels, as Jews, Christians, Magians and Quraysh claim [p 500 to 501]. Furat follows Muqatil, cites him openly (unlike the Sunni tradition), and seals the passage with al-Baqir's report that the whole sura is Meccan [p 501 to 502].
Tabari: Ten Meanings of al-samad
Tabari gives two occasions: polytheists asking for God's lineage, and Jews asking "if God created creation, who created God?" In the second, the Prophet grows so angry that Gabriel calms him, and when they ask about God's arms and forearms, Q. 39:67 is revealed: they did not measure God by His true measure [p 503 to 504]. He then settles a grammar question on the nominative of ahad and prefers the reading with nunation for two reasons: it is more eloquent, and the reciters of the great cities agree on it [p 504 to 505].
On al-samad he lines up the reports without comment: not hollow (Ibn 'Abbas), solid with no cavity (Mujahid), one who eats no food (al-Sha'bi), one with no filling (Sa'id b. al-Musayyab), one from whom nothing issues ('Ikrima), one who neither begot nor was begotten, since what is born dies and is inherited from (Abu'l-'Aliya), the lord perfect in every kind of sovereignty and glory (Ibn 'Abbas), and the Enduring and Permanent (al-Hasan, Qatada). Qatada adds that this sura mentions nothing of this world or the next [p 505 to 508]. Tabari's own verdict rests on how Arabs used the word, proved by poetry: a lord to whom people turn, with none above him. A report going back to the Prophet would settle it, if it were sound [p 508 to 509].
| Family of meanings | Representative glosses | Sources in the chapter | Later treatment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sought, depended on | Lord to whom all turn for needs; chief with none above | Tabari (verdict), Abu Hatim, Zamakhshari, Abu Hayyan, Fadl Allah | Razi: indicates positive attributes |
| Solid, impenetrable | Not hollow; no cavity; no filling; smooth stone | Muqatil, Furat, Tabari's reports, Razi's philologists | Abu Hatim and Razi reject as literal; Razi reads it as "unaffected by anything" |
| Free of bodily need | Neither eats nor drinks nor sleeps | Hud (al-Kalbi), al-Baqir in Tabrisi, Qatada | Tabrisi: the Living needs nothing |
| Enduring | Permanent; outlasts creation; "now as He always was" | Hud, Qatada, al-Hasan | Razi: negative attributes |
| Explained by the next verse | He who neither begot nor was begotten | Abu'l-'Aliya, Muhammad b. Ka'b, al-Husayn's letter | Tabrisi and Maybudi: each verse explains the one before |
| Letter mysticism | Five letters: existence, divinity, truth, kingdom, permanence | Al-Baqir in Tabrisi | Burusawi: practical virtues of reciting the name |
Table 29. What al-samad means: six families of glosses [p 494, 499 to 509, 512, 528 to 530, 545 to 548, 554].
Abu Hatim: The Arithmetic of One
The Isma'ili Abu Hatim treats wahid as priority: God was one before creation, which then became "a second". One is not itself a number but the cause of numbers; one times one is still one, and half of one is still described with the word "one" [p 509 to 510]. Ahad is the more perfect name. Saying nobody has "one" (wahid) supporting him leaves room for two or three; saying he has "not a single one" (ahad) rules out all. Created things are "two" because each is an attribute plus what bears it, and every composite is one in name but many in meaning; God alone is one in essence and in meaning [p 510 to 511]. On al-samad he notes the reading "not hollow" and rejects it as an attribute of God: it means the ultimate lord above whom there is none, to whom creation turns [p 512].
Maybudi: The Sura as a Love Letter
Maybudi turns the sura into God's address to Muhammad: strangers ask about My lineage; tell them God is One, unique in essence, attributes, glory and lordship [p 512 to 513]. Persian verses carry the argument: the heart sees You though the eye cannot; it is wrong to separate the eye from the Friend [p 513]. Ansari's voice follows: existence that runs back to non-existence is borrowed (majaz), not real; plant the flag of your own non-being in the world of His being [p 514]. Then, adapting Qushayri, each verse explains the one before, and each word unveils God to a different reader: "He" to the madly in love, "God" to the mystics, "One" to those who affirm unity, "the Besought" to the learned, and the final verses to people of intellect [p 514 to 515]. The passage ends on love as reciprocity: when enemies called the Prophet poet, soothsayer or sorcerer, God answered for him; when they ascribe partners or a son to God, the Prophet answers for Him with this sura [p 515 to 516].
Zamakhshari and Tabrisi: Grammar, Merits, Imams
Zamakhshari stays grammatical. "He" is the pronoun of the matter: the matter is that God is One. Ibn Mas'ud and Ubayy read without "Say", the Prophet reportedly without "Say: He", and he said that reciting "God is One" equals the whole Qur'an. Al-samad is the master to whom one turns; the editors find little Mu'tazili doctrine here [p 516 to 518].
Tabrisi is encyclopaedic. He lists names (sura of tawhid, of sincerity, of al-samad, "the attribution of the Lord", and with Q. 109 "the two cures" from associationism and hypocrisy), counts verses (five in the Meccan and Syrian count, four elsewhere), and gathers merits: a third of the Qur'an; palaces in Paradise for twelve recitations; plenty for a poor man who greets his empty house and recites it; seventy thousand angels at the funeral of Sa'd b. Mu'adh; a week without it, says Ja'far al-Sadiq, and one dies in the religion of Abu Lahab [p 518 to 520]. His meaning section is unusually esoteric. Al-Baqir explains huwa: the ha points to something fixed, the waw to what is absent from the senses, against the idolaters who pointed to their gods with "these". 'Ali dreams of al-Khidr before Badr and learns "O He, other than whom there is no He", the greatest name [p 526 to 527]. "Allah" derives from bewilderment: creatures are baffled by His essence [p 527 to 528]. Al-Husayn writes to the Basrans that nothing dense or subtle issues from God, and no states such as sleep, grief, laughter or fear arise in Him [p 529]. Al-Baqir reads the five letters of al-samad as signs of existence, hidden divinity, truthfulness, kingdom and permanence, and laments that he has no one able to carry what he knows [p 530 to 531]. The section closes with eight kinds of associationism, each excluded by one phrase of the sura, and 'Ali reciting it in every prayer out of love, to which the Prophet replies that God will love him for it [p 531 to 532].
Razi: Twenty Names and Three Stations
Razi opens with merits and three occasions of revelation (polytheists, Jews, and a Christian delegation from Najran who ask whether God is made of chrysolite or sapphire) [p 533 to 535]. He then gives twenty names, from "divestment" and "sincerity" (because it lists only attributes of majesty) to "foundation" (the heavens and earths rest on it), "the preventer" (from the torment of the grave), "light" ("the light of the Qur'an", as the pupil is the light of the eye), and "security" [p 535 to 538]. Why a third of the Qur'an? Because the aim of every law and rite is knowledge of God's essence, attributes and acts, and this sura covers the essence; Q. 109 is a quarter, since it covers one of the four classes of action and abstention, heart and limbs [p 538].
His issues include a small allegory. Knowledge of God is a present paradise because it satisfies both intellect (which wants someone to thank) and desire (which wants someone to ask). Doubt then whispers: perhaps He has an equal? So God sent the Prophet with "Say", sparing the servant the labour of proof [p 539 to 540]. On grammar he reports three parsings of verse one and three ways of distinguishing ahad from wahid: only God may be called ahad (al-Azhari); ahad excludes even two challengers; wahid suits affirmation, ahad negation [p 540 to 542].
Then the stations. Those "brought near" see no existent but God, because everything else is contingent and nothing in itself, so "He" is enough for them. Those "of the right" see both God and creation and need "God" to tell them apart. Those "of the left" allow more than one necessary being, so "One" is added for them [p 543 to 544]. A "nobler" reading follows: "God" sums up the positive attributes (power, will, knowledge of all), "One" the negative ones (no composition, no place, no change), so "God, One" holds everything the intellect can know of Him. A composite needs its parts and is contingent; two necessary beings would share necessity and differ in something else, so each would be composite [p 544 to 545]. On al-samad he lists eight positive and eighteen negative glosses (including al-Hasan's "He is now as He has always been"), condemns the "ignorant anthropomorphists" who use "solid" to prove God a body, and explains why ahad is indefinite and al-samad definite: oneness is unfamiliar to most creatures, while the idea of a lord sought in need was already known to the Arabs [p 546 to 549].
Figure 82. Three words of the first verse read as levels of reality and of readers [p 493, 514 to 515, 543 to 545, 549 to 551, 556 to 560].
Kashani and Burusawi: Oneness as Being
Kashani reads "Say" as a command issued from union into the field of differentiation. "He" is the pure unitive reality; "God" is its equivalent with all attributes, showing that attributes add nothing to the essence. He cites 'Ali's sermon: the perfection of sincerity is negating attributes from Him [p 549 to 550]. Ahad is the essence with no regard to multiplicity, the "camphor spring" of Q. 76, existence as such; wahid is the same essence regarded through its many names, like an ocean imagined as drops [p 550 to 551]. Al-samad is the support on which every contingent thing depends, for contingency belongs to essences, not to existence. God's effects exist in Him and are nothing in themselves; "Sheer nothingness is not similar to pure being", which is why no one is equal to Him and why the sura is called "the foundation" [p 551 to 552].
Abu Hayyan adds philology: the occasion decides whether "He" refers to the Lord or is the pronoun of the matter; Tha'lab says one may say "God is ahad" but never "Zayd is ahad"; Ibn al-Anbari reports that no philologist disputes that al-samad means the lord above whom there is none [p 552 to 554]. Sharafi quotes the Zaydi imam al-Qasim b. Ibrahim: single in excellence, the final one relied on, unlike numerical ones [p 555].
Burusawi builds on Kashani. The name "God" gathers all names; its true bearer is the "Servant of God", the Prophet and the poles after him [p 556]. Ahad admits no connection with creation, which is why Q. 37:4 says "your God is wahid". Through Shaykhzada he repeats Razi's three stations and defends the Sufi practice of invoking "He" [p 556 to 558]. He calls ahadiyya union and samadiyya differentiation, the first reached by dissolving multiplicity, the second by descending into the world of witnessing. He records his own experience, his inner tongue repeating "Pre-eternal, Sempiternal, One, Besought", and practical virtues: a thousand repetitions of ahad in retreat bring marvels; al-samad recited 125 times counters sorcery [p 559 to 560].
Alusi and Fadl Allah: Testing Reports, Simplifying the Creed
Alusi reviews the names and the hadith behind them as a critic. The "foundation" hadith is not in the recognised collections, though its point holds: heaven and earth exist to point to God's unity. The "attribution" hadith is very weak, even fabricated; the "preventer" report conflicts with a sounder one [p 561 to 563]. He faults Razi as no authority on reports, since Razi does not "separate the wheat from the chaff" [p 564]. On the third of the Qur'an he surveys explanations (stories, laws and creed; Ghazali's origin, return and the path between; wages with a completion bonus; al-Khafaji's gold plate set with jewels) and prefers his own: God may grant more reward for less labour, as He does for certain times and places, and the wisdom is His [p 566 to 569]. He records that some Sufis treat "He" as a divine name, while noting the transmitted reports do not support it [p 571].
Fadl Allah sees the sura as a summary of everything the Qur'an says about God and creation. Its creed is simple without being naive: a simple person can grasp it without detail, and an intellectual can hold it without giving up reflection, which is why Islam is called the religion of instinct (fitra) [p 572 to 573]. Quoting Tabataba'i, he explains ahad as what admits no multiplicity at all, outward or mental. God wants to be known through His uniqueness while people avoid probing His essence, since the mind "cannot reach Him in His elusive and hidden mystery" [p 573 to 574]. All other powers are borrowed from His; polytheism has only ever been about sharing the management of the world, and even that is excluded, except for the chain of causes running by His will [p 574 to 575].
| Commentator | Main register | Signature contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Muqatil | Narrative | 'Amir b. al-Tufayl's questions, one verse per question |
| Hud, Qummi, Furat | Reports and polemic | Lineage question; denials of Ezra, Jesus, stars, angels |
| Tabari | Reports, grammar, poetry | Ten glosses on al-samad; Arab usage decides |
| Abu Hatim | Isma'ili lexicon | One is the cause of number; ahad more perfect |
| Maybudi | Persian love mysticism | Each word unveils God to a different kind of reader |
| Zamakhshari | Grammar | Pronoun of the matter; variant readings |
| Tabrisi | Twelver encyclopaedia | Merits; imams' letter and dream lore; eight kinds of shirk |
| Razi | Ash'ari logic | Twenty names; three stations; positive and negative attributes |
| Kashani | Metaphysics of being | What lacks absolute being is nothing |
| Abu Hayyan, Sharafi | Philology | Only God is ahad; al-Qasim's culmination of goodness |
| Burusawi | Akbari Sufism | Ahadiyya as union, samadiyya as differentiation; practice |
| Alusi | Hadith criticism | Grades the merit reports; rebukes Razi's credulity |
| Fadl Allah | Modern Twelver | Creed of instinct, simple yet deep |
Table 30. Sixteen commentators on four verses [p 495 to 575].
Synthesis
Six verses, some twenty commentators and thirteen centuries. This part pulls the threads together: the takeaways worth keeping, the frameworks the commentators reuse, a critical look at the anthology itself, a Who's Who with the book's own dates, and some connections to modern work.
Key Takeaways
- Form is stable; opinion is not. Commentary kept the same shape for centuries (verse, reports, philology, judgement), and that shape proved roomy enough for opposed theologies [p 1, 4].
- Labels describe, they do not sort. "Commentary by report" and "commentary by opinion" are tendencies; almost every work mixes both [p 5 to 6].
- A pause can decide a theology. Whether one stops after "God" in Q. 3:7 decides whether the firmly rooted share in interpretation [p 6].
- Outer and inner are layers, not rivals. The four-fold scheme cited from Ja'far al-Sadiq (expression, allusion, subtleties, realities) gives each kind of reader a level [p 18].
- Esoteric readers call their work ta'wil. The editors put it sharply: "Sunni ta'wil is largely tafsir, whereas Shi'i and Sufi tafsir, where it matters most, is essentially ta'wil" [p 18].
- Two working modes. Some commentators treat nearly every verse; others choose verses that let them voice a school [p 3 to 4].
- Questions drift over time. On Q. 2:115 early exegetes asked about the prayer direction; later ones asked whether God can be in a place [p 67, 70 to 72].
- The same tools serve opposite schools. Reading "face" as essence, pleasure or direction appears across Sunni, Shi'i and Mu'tazili works alike (Chapter 1).
- The neat pattern breaks. On the seat, Ibn 'Abbas, the traditionists' own authority, is the source of the "knowledge" reading, while the Sufi Maybudi is a strict literalist (Chapter 2).
- A verse becomes a mirror. Each commentator on the Throne Verse finds there the threat he most fears: corporealism, denial of intercession, or idolatry (Chapter 2).
- Mercy needs a grammar. The phrase "upon Himself" carries the weight: commentators look for a way to make mercy God's own commitment rather than a debt owed to creatures (Chapter 3).
- Nobody says the lamp is God. Every reader of the light verse moves from the physical lamp to something unseen: guidance, scripture, the heart, the Prophet, the imams or being itself (Chapter 4).
- Genealogy can hide in an image. Muqatil and the Shi'i reports both make the lamp a story of inheritance, passed from vessel to vessel (Chapter 4).
- Literalness has degrees. "God is the Light" is read as figure, as attribute, as philosophical truth and as ontology (Chapter 4).
- One vowel can carry free will. The case ending on kull in Q. 54:49 was made to carry the predestination debate (Chapter 5).
- Opponents change while the text stays. A dispute that began as duelling hadith became a dispute over one case ending, and by the twentieth century Sunni and Shi'i commentators alike were arguing against randomness rather than each other (Chapter 5).
- The shortest sura generated the most genres. Battle stories, lexicography, arithmetic, Persian poetry, letter mysticism and Akbari ontology all gather around Q. 112 (Chapter 6).
- "One" is not a number. Abu Hatim al-Razi treats one as the cause of numbers rather than one of them [p 509 to 512].
- Positive and negative attributes can be split cleanly. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi reads "God" as the sum of positive attributes and "One" as the sum of negative ones [p 544 to 545].
- Grading matters. Alusi faults Razi for failing to "separate the wheat from the chaff" in the names and merits he reports [p 564].
- Plurality was the editors' aim. They chose commentaries to show range, not to crown a best one [p 11].
Frameworks Table
A closer look
A thematic arrangement, as the editors admit, is not foolproof: other groupings, by period, school or topic, would bring out other patterns [p 12 to 14]. Extracts cut long arguments, so a commentator's method can look thinner than it is. Several attributions remain uncertain: the earliest works may not be what they claim to be [p 2, n.10], the edition of Qummi was censored [p 24 to 25], and the commentary long credited to Ibn 'Arabi is Kashani's [p 38 to 39]. Not every modern voice appears in every chapter; Mawdudi and the
Manarcommentary are absent from the oneness chapter, for example.
Reading the dates.Small inconsistencies show the difficulty of early biography. The commentators section treats the eleventh imam, al-Hasan al-'Askari, as dying in 260/874 [p 24], while the appendix prints 254/868 [p 585]. Readers should treat early dates as approximate.
What the reader must supply.The book does not resolve its debates. It trains comparison. The four questions from Part One (school, method, opponent and what the verse must prove) are the reader's main tool.
Who's Who
Dates as printed in the book (Hijri/Common Era).
| Name | Dates | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn 'Abbas | d. 68/687 | Prophet's cousin; held to be founder of exegesis [p 2, 585] |
| Ibn Mas'ud | d. 32/652 | Companion; variant readings; four-fold hadith [p 2, 6] |
| al-Hasan al-Basri | d. 110/728 | Pietist and Iraqi commentator; main source for Hud [p 2, 585] |
| 'Ikrima | d. 105/723-4 | Successor; frequent authority in chains [p 2] |
| Ja'far al-Sadiq | d. 148/765 | Sixth Shi'i imam; layered reading of scripture [p 2, 18] |
| Muqatil b. Sulayman | d. 150/767 | Most likely earliest extant commentary [p 21 to 23] |
| al-Farra' | d. 207/822 | Kufan grammarian; philological source [p 3, 584] |
| Hud b. Muhakkam al-Hawwari | fl. 4th/10th c. | Ibadi commentator of North Africa [p 23 to 24] |
| al-Qummi | fl. 4th/10th c. | Early full Shi'i commentary [p 24 to 25] |
| Furat al-Kufi | fl. late 3rd/9th c. | Shi'i commentator on loyalty and imams [p 25 to 26] |
| al-'Ayyashi | fl. late 3rd/9th c. | Samarqand Shi'i; extant to sura 18 [p 26 to 27] |
| al-Tabari | d. 310/923 | First classical commentary [p 4, 28 to 29] |
| Abu Hatim al-Razi | d. 322/934-5 | Isma'ili missionary; Kitab al-Zina [p 29 to 30] |
| Ja'far b. Mansur al-Yaman | d. ante 346/957 | Fatimid esoteric interpreter [p 30 to 31] |
| al-Ghazali | d. 505/1111 | Source of Razi's ladder of light [p 584] |
| Maybudi | fl. 6th/12th c. | Persian Sufi commentary begun 520/1126 [p 32 to 35] |
| al-Zamakhshari | d. 538/1144 | Mu'tazili grammarian, Kashshaf [p 35] |
| al-Tabrisi | d. 548/1154 | Most widely used Twelver commentary [p 36 to 37] |
| Fakhr al-Din al-Razi | d. 606/1209 | Ash'ari philosopher-theologian [p 37 to 38] |
| al-Baydawi | d. 685/1286 | Ash'ari revision of Zamakhshari [p 583] |
| Kashani | d. 736/1336 | Akbari commentary once credited to Ibn 'Arabi [p 38 to 39] |
| Abu Hayyan | d. 745/1344 | Andalusian grammarian in Cairo [p 39 to 40] |
| Abu Hanifa | d. 150/767 | Founder of the Hanafi school [p 579] |
| Abu Yazid al-Bastami | d. 261/874 or 264/877-8 | Khurasani Sufi of ecstatic sayings [p 583] |
Table 32. Who's Who, with dates as printed in the book.
Glossary of Key Terms
Terms as used in the anthology, with brief meanings and the page where the book explains them.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ahad | "One" in Q. 112; read as a oneness that admits no partner, part or number [p 491 to 576] |
| ahl al-qibla | "People of the prayer direction": all who pray towards Mecca, a marker of Muslim unity [p 9 to 10] |
| 'arsh | God's throne, distinct in most readings from the seat [p 127 onward] |
| batin / zahir | Inner and outer sense of a verse [p 6 to 7] |
| hadd / muttala' | "Limit" and "look-out point", the third and fourth layers in the Ibn Mas'ud hadith [p 6 to 7] |
| ishara | Allusion; the level of meaning for the elite in Ja'far al-Sadiq's scheme [p 18] |
| isra'iliyyat | Narratives drawn from Jewish and Christian lore used in early commentary [p 3, 21 to 23] |
| kalam | Rational theology, as practised by Mu'tazilis and Ash'aris |
| kursi | The "seat" of Q. 2:255; read as footstool, knowledge, sovereignty or a cosmic sphere [p 127 onward] |
| muhkamat / mutashabihat | Clear and ambiguous verses, contrasted in Q. 3:7 [p 6] |
| mushabbiha | Anthropomorphists, who liken God to creatures [p 546] |
| nawba | "Turn" or session; Maybudi's three stages of commentary [p 32 to 35] |
| qadar | Divine measure or decree; the key word of Q. 54:49 [p 455 onward] |
| qibla | Direction of prayer [p 67 onward] |
| Qur'an natiq / samit | "Speaking" Qur'an (the imam) and "silent" Qur'an (the text), in Isma'ili thought [p 11 to 12] |
| qussas | Storytellers whose narrative exegesis is among the earliest [p 1 to 2] |
| ra'y | Personal opinion or reasoned judgement in commentary [p 5 to 6] |
| samad | Epithet in Q. 112:2; glossed as the Lord sought for every need, or as solid and "not hollow" [p 491 to 576] |
| shafa'a | Intercession, debated under Q. 2:255 |
| tafsir | Explanation of the Qur'an; root f-s-r occurs once in the Qur'an, at 25:33 [p 5] |
| tafwid | Consigning the manner of an ambiguous attribute to God without explaining it [p 32 to 35] |
| tatbiq | Kashani's method of mapping the cosmos onto the person [p 38 to 39] |
| ta'wil | Interpretation; often esoteric reading, sometimes "that which will be" [p 5, 7] |
| wajh | Face; also direction, aspect, essence [p 68 to 69] |
| walaya / bara'a | Loyalty to the imams and dissociation from their opponents [p 25 to 26] |
| walla | To turn towards or away from, in Q. 2:115 [p 67 to 68] |
About this book
An Anthology of Qur'anic Commentaries, Volume I: On the Nature of the Divine by Feras Hamza, Sajjad Rizvi, and Farhana Mayer (eds.), 2008. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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