A Sea-Change in Qur’anic Hermeneutics: ḥadīth Citation in al-Farrāʾ's Maʿānī al-Qurʾān

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the classical tafsīr tradition has shown it to be characterised by, first, an interest in the polyvalent readings of the Qur’an and, second, methodological variegation. It is widely held that these features first appeared in exegetical works of the fourth/tenth century, particularly those of al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) and al-Thaʿlabī (d. 427/1035). However, in the following paper I argue that it is rather in Abū Zakariyyā al-Farrāʾ’s (d. 207/824) Maʿānī al-Qurʾān, a linguistic-oriented tafsīr from nearly a century earlier, that we first find the features of mature classical tafsīr. In this article, I focus on al-Farrāʾ’s citation of ḥadīths to illuminate his methodological variegation, which is scattered throughout his dense discussions of the Qur’an. His use of ḥadīths proves to be a good measure of his methodological variegation, given their wide reception and application in nearly all the disciplines of Arabo-Islamic scholarship utilised by exegetes. These observations provide a missing link that furthers our understanding of how the tafsīr tradition grew from the simpler, more concise forms of the second/eighth century to the exhaustive, encyclopaedic works of the fourth/tenth century onward.