Tafsir al-Tabari

Al-Tabari's full title announces the project: the comprehensive exposition of the interpretation of the verses of the Quran. For each verse the commentary proceeds in a fixed rhythm. The verse is cited, the possible readings of its Arabic are set out, and then the transmitted interpretations arrive, each introduced by a chain of authorities running back to a companion of the Prophet such as Ibn Abbas, or to an early interpreter such as Mujahid, Qatada or al-Suddi.

Where the traditions disagree, al-Tabari lists the positions as numbered opinions, argues from grammar, from the usage of the Arabs and from parallel verses, and then declares which reading he holds most correct, in a formula that recurs thousands of times. This willingness both to preserve every inherited opinion and to adjudicate among them is what gave the work its double character, at once an archive and a judgment.

Later commentators mined it in both capacities: those who wanted the early tradition found it stored here with its documentation intact, and those who wanted a master's verdict found that too. Because so many of the early written sources al-Tabari drew on subsequently vanished, his commentary became the principal surviving witness to the first age of Quranic exegesis, and modern scholarship still reconstructs lost works from his quotations.

Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, born in Amul in Tabaristan around 839 CE and settled in Baghdad, was one of the most prodigiously productive scholars of the classical Islamic world. He composed, alongside the tafsir, the vast universal History of Prophets and Kings, and his learning ranged across law, hadith and the readings of the Quran; he even founded a short-lived legal school of his own, the Jariri madhhab, before dying in Baghdad in 923 CE.

Tradition reports that he first planned both his commentary and his history at far greater length and abridged them out of mercy for his students. The tafsir circulated widely from the start, and its standing only grew as the works it quoted disappeared, leaving it the gateway to early exegesis. For centuries it was known in full to relatively few, surviving in scattered manuscripts, until a complete text was recovered and printed in Cairo at the beginning of the twentieth century, an event that reshaped modern study of tafsir. Editions in thirty volumes became standard, translations of portions followed in many languages, and present-day commentators of every orientation, traditionalist and academic alike, cite it as the indispensable base layer of the genre. In the common ranking of the tradition, tafsir by transmission begins here, and every later work of the kind stands on it.