The Qurʾān in Islam

A Note on This Translation

This edition renders ʿAllāma al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s short introduction to the Qurʾān into English. The base text is the Persian original, Qurʾān dar Islām — the work the author composed in Persian, expressly for translation into the Western languages, as the second volume of a trilogy assembled with Professor Kenneth Morgan of Colgate University. The Arabic recension al-Qurʾān fī al-Islām and the existing English translation of the Al-Qalam Translators & Writers Bureau (World Islamic Network, 1998) have been consulted throughout as secondary controls, not as the text translated.

Qurʾānic verses are given in the translation of ʿAlī Qulī Qarāʾī, cited by sūra and verse in the form (2:148). Where the author quotes only a clause of a verse, only that clause is given. Words in square brackets within a quotation are Qarāʾī’s own supplements; a parenthetical gloss following a quotation is the author’s.

— Translator

Contents

Page numbers follow the Persian print edition. Sections not yet translated are marked “—” and their subsection detail will be added with each installment.

Introduction

In the Name of God, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful. The book now before the honoured reader speaks of the most deeply rooted document of the sacred religion of Islam. The subject taken up for discussion in it is the standing of “the Glorious Qurʾān” in the world of Islam: What is the Qurʾān, and what value does it hold among the Muslims? The Qurʾān as a book at once universal and perpetual; the Qurʾān as a heavenly revelation, not the offspring of human thought; the relation of the Qurʾān to the sciences; and the attributes of the Glorious Qurʾān.

In truth, we are inquiring into the standing of a book which — though the great religion of Islam, like the other great religions of the world,

is beset by internal disagreements and by many sectarian divisions — no Muslim has ever doubted in its authority, its reverence, and its sanctity; and to it one may cling in support of any claim advanced in the name of Islam.

The aim of the discussion in this book is therefore to set forth the standing of the Glorious Qurʾān as this sacred book itself indicates it to be, and not as we hold it to be; and between these two — the book’s own letter and our own purpose — the difference is great. To put it otherwise: whatever standing we may assign to the Glorious Qurʾān, with proof or without it, if that standing runs counter to the Qurʾānic statement it can have no assured value; and if it is something on which the Qurʾānic statement is silent, then, given the divergence of views that exists among the Muslims, one cannot compel them all to accept it. Only that standing may be reckoned which the Glorious Qurʾān itself indicates.

In this inquiry and investigation, then, we are to answer the question, “What does the Qurʾān say concerning this?” — not the question, “What do we, who have adopted such-and-such a school of Islam, say concerning the Qurʾān?”

Part One
What Value Does the Glorious Qurʾān Have among the Muslims?

A. The Glorious Qurʾān Contains the Generalities of the Program for Human Life

For the religion of Islam — which secures and guarantees the happiness of human life better than any other religion — has reached the hands of the Muslims by way of the Glorious Qurʾān; and the religious materials of Islam, which are a set of doctrinal teachings and of moral and practical laws, have their principal root in the Glorious Qurʾān. God Most High says: “Indeed this Qurʾān guides to what is most upright” (17:9); and He says: “We have sent down the Book to you as a clarification of all things”

(16:89). It is plain that the fundamentals of religious belief, the moral virtues, and the generalities of the practical laws are set down in the Glorious Qurʾān in a great many verses, which there is no need to quote.

A Fuller Statement

By reflecting on the few premises that follow, one may grasp the true sense of the Glorious Qurʾān’s containing the program of human life.

1. In his life man has no aim whatever save his own happiness and felicity and success — happiness being a state of life that a man longs for and is enamoured of, such as freedom, ease, ample livelihood, and the like. And if now and then we see individuals who turn away from their own happiness — as one who, by his own hand,

puts an end to his life, or one who renounces the advantages of living — then, if we look closely into their inner state, we shall find that, owing to particular factors, they suppose their happiness to lie in the very thing they pursue. The one who ends his own life, for instance, under the assault of hardships sees his ease in death; and the one who has taken to abstinence and self-mortification, forbidding himself the material pleasures, supposes happiness to lie in the way he has chosen. The activity of man’s life, then, is forever directed toward the winning of happiness and toward success in that pursuit — whether he be right in discerning his true happiness or mistaken.

2. The activity of man’s life never takes place without a program. This is a self-evident matter, and if now and then it is hidden, that is from the very excess of its clarity. For, on the one hand, man acts by his own will and choice, so that until he judges some task “to be done” under the prevailing conditions he does not set about it — that is, he performs the deed in obedience to an inner cognitive directive; and, on the other hand, the deeds he performs he brings about for “himself,”

that is, to meet the needs he perceives; and so between his deeds and his acts there is a direct connection.

Eating and drinking, sleep and waking, sitting and rising, going and coming, and the rest — each has its place and its measure: in one state necessary, in another not; under some conditions beneficial, under others harmful. The performance of any act is thus in accordance with an inner directive, the generalities of which are stored in man’s understanding and which is brought to realization by being applied to particular cases.

Each individual man, in his private acts, is like a country whose inhabitants’ activities are governed under fixed laws, norms, and usages; and the active powers of that country are bound first to conform their acts to its binding directives, and only then to carry them out.

The social activities of a community, likewise, stand in the same case as the activities of the individual: there must ever rule among them some kind of regulation, usage, and custom to which the majority of its members submit — for otherwise the parts of the community, through anarchy, would in the shortest span and the briefest interval fall into confusion and disintegrate.

In the end: if the community be a religious one, its rule will belong to the ordinances of religion; if it be a non-religious but civilized community, its activities will follow law; and if it be a non-religious community, savage and barbarous, it will carry out such usages and customs as a single despotic ruler has laid down and imposed, or such observances as have arisen through the collision and the grinding-together of divergent beliefs within it.

In every case, then, man cannot do without an aim in his individual and his social activities, nor can he ever dispense with pursuing that aim by the road that befits it and with applying the regulations that constitute the program of the work. The Glorious Qurʾān, too, confirms this same view, saying: “Everyone has a cynosure to which he turns; so take the lead in all good works” (2:148) — that you may attain a lofty goal.

Fundamentally, in the idiom of the Qurʾān the word “religion” (dīn) is applied to the way and manner of living; and the believer and the unbeliever alike — even those who deny the Maker altogether —

are not without a religion; for the life of man simply does not take shape without some way and manner, whether it come from the side of prophethood and revelation, or by way of human enactment and convention. God Most High, describing the wrongdoers who are at enmity with the religion of God — of whatever class and kind they be — says: “Those who bar [others] from the way of Allah, and seek to make it crooked” (7:45).¹

3. The best and most enduring way and manner of life is that toward which the very creation of man guides, and not that which springs from the emotions and sentiments of an individual or a community. If we bring each of the parts of creation under scrutiny, we shall see that in its very existence it has an aim and an end, toward which it is turned from the first day of its coming-to-be, and

that by the fittest and nearest road leading to that end it proceeds toward its aim; and within and without its own structure it is furnished with an equipment suited to its aim and to the source of its several activities. The procedure of creation is the same in every created thing, living and lifeless alike.

A stalk of wheat, for example, from the very first day of its emergence — when, in the bed of the soil, it thrusts its green tip out from the belly of the grain — is turned toward becoming a wheat-plant bearing many ears; and with the powers with which it is furnished it draws elemental parts from earth and air in a particular proportion, joins them to its own being, and grows from day to day greater and more flourishing, passing from state to state and from form to form, until it reaches the form of a complete plant bearing many ears, and there brings its course to its close.

A walnut tree, likewise, if we bring it under study, we shall find that it too, from the first day of its emergence, is turned toward an aim peculiar to itself — namely to become a flourishing and vigorous walnut tree — and that, to reach it, it treads a road suited to the equipment it possesses, keeping ever to its own manner of life;

it never one day, in pursuit of its own aim, takes the road of the wheat-stalk, just as the wheat-stalk, in pursuit of its aim, never one day adopts the manner of the walnut tree.

All the kinds of created things that make up the world we behold are subject to this same universal rule; and there is no ground for supposing the human species to be excepted from it — the rule, namely, that every kind has an aim in the attaining of which its happiness lies, and a road, suited to the equipment of its being, toward that aim. Indeed, the very equipment of man’s being is the best evidence that man too, like the other kinds of creation, has an aim that comprises his happiness, and has a road, suited to the equipment of his being, toward his aim and his happiness.

By what has been said, then, the particular creation of man — and likewise the creation of the world, of which man is an inseparable part — guides man toward his real happiness, and presses upon him the most important, most deeply rooted, and most enduring regulations, the applying of which guarantees his happiness. God Most High, in confirmation of the foregoing, says: “Our Lord is He who gave everything its creation and then guided it” (20:50).

And again He says: “who created and proportioned, who determined and guided” (87:2–3). And again He says: “by the soul and Him who fashioned it, and inspired it with [discernment between] its virtues and vices: one who purifies it is felicitous, and one who betrays it fails” (91:7–10). And again He says: “So set your heart on the religion as a people of pure faith, according to which He originated mankind. There is no altering Allah’s creation; that is the upright religion” (30:30) —

the religion that has the power to order the life of man. And again He says: “Indeed, with Allah religion is Islām” (3:19) — that is, religion and the manner of life, in God’s sight, is submission before His will, that is, before His creation, which summons man to particular regulations. And He says: “Should anyone follow a religion other than Islam, it shall never be accepted from him” (3:85).

The upshot of the foregoing verses — and of others to the same purport — is that God Most High guides each of His creatures, man among them, toward the happiness and the aim of its own particular creation, and by way of that creation; that the real road for man in the course of his life is precisely that toward which his own particular creation summons him; and that he must apply, in his individual and his social life, those regulations toward which the nature of a primordial (natural) man is guided — and not those of men polluted by caprice and appetite and held captive by their emotions and their sentiments.

The requirement of the primordial (natural) religion is that the equipment of man’s being be not nullified, and that the due of each part of it be discharged; and that the various and opposing apparatuses — such as the several powers of emotion and sentiment deposited within his frame — be brought into balance, each being granted leave to act to the measure that it does not encroach upon the rest. And in the end: within the individual man let the intellect rule, and not the desire of the soul, nor the dominance of emotion and sentiment, however contrary these be to sound intellect; and within society, too, let the real right and welfare of the community rule, and not the caprice of a single powerful and despotic individual, nor yet the will of the majority, though it run counter to the right and against the true welfare of the community.

From the discussion above a further result also follows: that the rein of rule in legislation lies in God’s hand alone, and that it befits none but Him to legislate a law, to lay down regulations, and to appoint an obligation. For, as became clear, the only regulations and laws that serve man upon the road of life are those that have been appointed for him by way of creation —

that is, those to which the outward and inward causes and factors of man summon him and which they require of him; which is to say, those that God has willed. For the meaning of God’s willing a thing is that He has brought into being the causes and conditions of its coming to pass. In sum: sometimes the causes and conditions are such as to necessitate the compulsory occurrence of a thing — as with the daily events of nature — and in this case the will is termed the creative (takwīnī) will; and sometimes they are such as to require that man perform the deed freely and by choice — as with eating and drinking — and in the domain of religion this will is termed the legislative (tashrīʿī) will. God Most High says, in several places of His speech: “Sovereignty belongs only to Allah” (12:40, 67).

Once these premises are clear, it must be recognized that the Glorious Qurʾān, in due regard for these three premises — namely, that man in his life has an aim (the happiness of life), for the winning of which he must strive throughout his life; that this activity will bear no fruit without a program; and that this program must in turn be read from the book of nature and creation, and

— to put it otherwise — learned from divine instruction — the Glorious Qurʾān, in regard for these premises, cast the foundation of the program of man’s life in this wise:

It set the knowledge of God as the basis of its program, and recognized belief in the oneness of God as the first foundation of religion. Then, having made God known, it drew from that the knowledge of the Return — belief in the Day of Resurrection, on which the reward and the requital of man’s good and evil deeds shall be rendered — and set it as a second principle. And after that it drew the knowledge of the Prophet from the knowledge of the Return; for the requital of good and evil deeds does not take shape without the prior conveying of obedience and disobedience, of good and evil, by way of revelation and prophethood, as we shall explain. This too it set as a further principle; and these three named principles — belief in the oneness of God, belief in prophethood, and belief in the Return — it reckoned the principles (uṣūl) of the religion of Islam.

Thereafter, at the next rank, it set forth the principles of praiseworthy character and of the goodly traits befitting those three principles, which a clear-sighted man of faith must possess and be marked by. And after that it established the practical laws, which are in truth the guardians of true happiness,

and the begetters and nurturers of praiseworthy character — and, above that, the very agent of the growth and advancement of the true beliefs and the primary principles.

For it can never be granted that a man who, in matters of sex, or in theft and treachery and the embezzling of property and the cheating of people, keeps no restraint whatever, should yet possess the trait of chastity of soul; nor that a man enamoured of the amassing of wealth, who withholds people’s dues and the obligatory financial rights, should be marked by the trait of open-handedness; nor that a man who does not engage in the worship of God, and for a week or a month together does not so much as call God to mind, should possess faith in God and in the Day of Resurrection, and should hold the station of servanthood.

Praiseworthy character, then, stays ever alive by a train of befitting deeds and acts — just as praiseworthy character itself stands in the same case with respect to the fundamental beliefs. A man, for instance, whose head holds nothing but pride and arrogance, conceit and self-admiration — belief in God and humility before the Lordly station are not to be looked for from him; and a man who for a whole lifetime has never grasped the meaning of fairness and magnanimity, of mercy and tenderness, cannot possess a faith in the Day of Resurrection and of the reckoning

to come.

God Most High, concerning the bond between the true beliefs and praiseworthy character — which is itself a kind of belief — and deed, says: “To Him ascends the good word, and He elevates righteous conduct” (35:10). (The pure word — that is, belief — ascends toward God, and righteous deed raises it up: that is, it aids the belief in its ascent.) And concerning the bond between belief and deed He says: “Then the fate of those who committed misdeeds was that they denied the signs of Allah and they used to deride them” (30:10).

In sum, the Glorious Qurʾān comprises the principal roots of Islam, which form three general divisions, in this order:

1. The principles of Islamic belief — of which one kind is the three principles of religion (divine unity, prophethood, and the Return), and another kind the beliefs that branch from them, such as the Tablet and the Pen, the Decree and the Determination, the angels, the Throne and the Seat, and the creation of

the heavens and the earth, and their like.

2. Praiseworthy character.

3. The revealed ordinances and practical laws, whose generalities the Noble Qurʾān has itself stated, entrusting their details and particulars to the exposition of the Noble Prophet (ṣ); and the Noble Prophet (ṣ), in turn, in accordance with the ḥadīth of Thaqalayn — which all the sects of Islam have transmitted by mass transmission (tawātur) — has set the exposition of his Ahl al-Bayt in the place of, and as the substitute for, his own exposition.²

B. The Glorious Qurʾān Is a Document of Prophethood

The Glorious Qurʾān, in several places, affirms in plain terms that it is the speech of God — that is, that with these very words it has issued from the Lordly station, and that the Noble Prophet (ṣ) received it with those same words. And in the course of establishing this very point — that it is the speech of God and not the speech of man — it has, again and again amid the noble verses, taken up the posture of challenge (taḥaddī), reckoning the Glorious Qurʾān a miracle from every side, and beyond

the power and capacity of man. Thus He says: “Do they say, ‘He has improvised it [himself]?’ … Let them bring a discourse like it, if they are truthful” (52:33–34). And He says: “Say, ‘Should all humans and jinn rally to bring the like of this Qurʾān, they will not bring the like of it, even if they assisted one another’” (17:88). And He says: “Do they say, ‘He has fabricated it?’ Say, ‘Then bring ten sūrahs like it, fabricated’” (11:13). And He says: “Do they say, ‘He has fabricated it?’ Say, ‘Then bring a sūrah like it’”

(10:38). And again, in challenge to the Noble Prophet (ṣ), He says: “And if you are in doubt concerning what We have sent down to Our servant, then bring a sūrah like it” (2:23) — that is, from a man like him, who had never studied nor learned to write, and who had grown up in the very midst of the Age of Ignorance. And again, from the angle of its freedom from disagreement and contradiction, He challenges them, saying: “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān? Had it been from [someone] other than Allah, they would have surely found much discrepancy in it” (4:82) — for everything in this world is subject to the law of change and development, and is not free of the contradiction of its parts and states; and had the Qurʾān been the work of man, wrought piece by piece across the span of three-and-twenty years, it would not have remained sound of the contradiction of attributes and states, nor been thus of a single texture throughout.

The Glorious Qurʾān, which by these challenges proclaims and establishes that it is the speech of God,

throughout the whole of itself presents Ḥaḍrat Muḥammad (ṣ), in plain terms, as the Prophet and Messenger of God, and by this very means becomes the document of that Ḥaḍrat’s prophethood. Upon this same principle, God in His speech repeatedly commands the Noble Prophet (ṣ), in the establishing of his own prophethood, to appeal to the testimony of God — that is, to the Qurʾān’s own explicit attestation of his prophethood: “Say, ‘Allah suffices as a witness between me and you’” (13:43). And in another place, over and above the testimony of God Most High, He relates the testimony of the angels as well: “But Allah bears witness to what He has sent down to you — He sent it down with His knowledge — and the angels bear witness [too], and Allah quite suffices as a witness” (4:166).

Part Two
How the Glorious Qurʾān Teaches

A. The Glorious Qurʾān Is a Universal Book

In its contents the Glorious Qurʾān is not confined to one nation among the nations — such as the Arab nation — nor to one community among the communities — such as the Muslims; rather it speaks to the peoples outside Islam

just as it speaks to the Muslims — as is shown by the many addresses³ it directs to the unbelievers, the polytheists, the People of the Book, the Jews, the Children of Israel, and the Christians, with each of whom it enters into argument, summoning them to its own true teachings. With each of these groups alike the Glorious Qurʾān enters into argument and summons, and never restricts its address to their being Arabs; as, of the polytheists — the idol-worshippers — He says: “Yet if they repent and maintain the prayer and give the zakāt, then they are your brethren in faith” (9:11); and of the People of the Book — the Jews and the Christians, and the Magians too, who are reckoned among the People of the Book — He says: “Say, ‘O People of the Book! Come to a word common between us and you: that we will worship no one but Allah, and that we will not ascribe any partner to Him, and that we will not take each other as lords besides Allah’” (3:64) —

for we find that He never said, “if the Arab polytheists repent,” nor did He say, “O People of the Book who are of Arab stock.” True, at the first dawn of Islam, when the summons had not yet passed beyond the Arabian Peninsula, the Qurʾānic addresses were naturally delivered to the Arab nation; but from the sixth year of the Hijra, once the summons had found its way beyond the Peninsula, there was no occasion whatever for imagining any restriction.

Beyond these, other verses too indicate the universality of the summons — such as the noble verse “…this Qurʾān has been revealed to me that I may warn thereby you and whomever it may reach” (6:19); and the noble verse “Yet it is just a reminder for all the nations” (68:52), and, to the same effect, (38:87); and the noble verse “Indeed it is one of the greatest [signs] — a warner to all humans” (74:35–36).

Historically, too, it is established that Islam [drew adherents] from among the followers of various religions — idol-worshippers, Jews, and Christians — and likewise from among sundry nations, such as Salmān the Persian, Ṣuhayb the Byzantine, and Bilāl the Abyssinian.

B. The Glorious Qurʾān Is a Complete Book

The Glorious Qurʾān comprises the complete aim of humanity and sets it forth in the most complete manner. For the aim of humanity — kneaded together with realism — is a complete worldview and the applying of the moral principles and practical laws that befit and are entailed by that worldview; and the Glorious Qurʾān takes upon itself the complete elucidation of this purpose. God Most High, describing it, says: “It guides to the truth and to a straight path” (46:30) — that is, to the truth in belief, and to a straight road in deed. And elsewhere, after mentioning the Torah and the Gospel, He says: “We have sent down to you the Book with the truth, confirming what was before it of the Book and as a guardian over it” (5:48)⁴

— confirming the [former] heavenly Book and standing over it as master and guardian. And, of the Qurʾān’s comprising the reality of the sacred laws of the former prophets, He says: “He has prescribed for you the religion which He had enjoined upon Noah and which We have [also] revealed to you, and which We had enjoined upon Abraham, Moses and Jesus” (42:13). And, comprehensively, He says: “We have sent down the Book to you as a clarification of all things” (16:89) — that is, sending it down by degrees as the clarifier of everything.

The upshot of the foregoing verses is that the Glorious Qurʾān comprises the reality of the aims of all the heavenly books, and more; and that whatever man needs, in belief and in deed, for the treading of the road of happiness and felicity, has been set forth in this Book fully and completely.

C. The Glorious Qurʾān Is a Perpetual Book

The discussion carried out in the foregoing section is enough to establish this claim; for a statement that is absolutely full and complete with respect to some purpose and matter will not have its validity and soundness bounded by a time or confined to a determinate age. The Glorious Qurʾān holds its own statement to be full and complete, and beyond completeness there is nothing. God Most High says: “it is indeed a decisive word, and it is not a jest” (86:13–14).

Likewise, its doctrinal teachings are pure reality and sheer fact, and the moral principles and practical laws it has set forth are the real fruits and offspring of those same fixed realities; and such a thing is not liable to nullification, nor open to abrogation with the passage of time. God Most High says: “With the truth did We send it down, and with the truth did it descend” (17:105) — that is, in its coming-to-be and in its endurance it is not sundered from the truth. And again He says: “So what is there after the truth except error?” (10:32) —

once you have passed beyond the truth, nothing remains but error. And elsewhere in His speech He says, comprehensively: “Indeed it is an august Book: falsehood cannot approach it, from before it nor from behind it” (41:41–42) — that is, neither now nor hereafter is it liable to nullification or to abrogation. Much has, to be sure, been said, and may yet be said, concerning the perpetuity of the Qurʾanic ordinances; but that lies outside the subject of this book, which is the standing of the Qurʾān among the Muslims as the Qurʾān itself indicates it.

D. The Glorious Qurʾān Is Independent in Its Signification

The Glorious Qurʾān, being of the genus of speech, discloses its intended meaning as do all other ordinary utterances, and is never mute in its signification; nor is there, from without, any evidence that the literal intent of the Qurʾān is other than what is understood from its Arabic wording.

That it is not mute in its own signification is plain: for anyone acquainted with the language plainly understands the meaning of the sentences of the noble verses, just as he understands the meaning of the sentences of any other Arabic utterance. Beyond this, we come upon a great many verses of the Qurʾān in which it makes some particular group — such as the Children of Israel, the believers, or the unbelievers — or, at times, people at large, the object of its address, conveying its purposes to them,⁵ or entering into argument with them, or taking up the posture of challenge and demanding of them that, if they harbour doubt that the Qurʾān is the speech of God, they bring the like of it. And plainly, to address people with words that do not possess the property of conveying meaning is meaningless; and likewise, to charge people to bring the like of a thing from which no determinate meaning is understood is not to be accepted. Moreover, God Most High says: “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān, or are there locks on the hearts?” (47:24)

— that is, do they not contemplate the Qurʾān, pursuing its verses with reflection? — and He says: “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān? Had it been from [someone] other than Allah, they would have surely found much discrepancy in it” (4:82). The indication of these verses is plain: that the Qurʾān admits of the contemplation which has the property of yielding understanding, and that such contemplation resolves the discrepancies among the verses that arise upon a superficial and initial view. And it is evident that, had the verses no manifest sense in their own meanings, reflection and contemplation upon them — and the resolving of their apparent discrepancies through reflection — would be without meaning.

As for there being no external evidence that annuls the authority of the outward senses (ẓawāhir) of the Qurʾān: no such evidence exists. Only, some have said that in grasping the intended meanings of the Qurʾān one must refer solely to the exposition of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), or to his exposition together with that of his noble Ahl al-Bayt. But this saying is not to be accepted; for the authority of the exposition of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and of the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) must itself first be extracted from the Qurʾān — and how, then, is it conceivable that the authority

of the Qurʾān’s signification should hang upon their exposition? Rather, in establishing the very principle of the messengership and the Imamate one must lay hold of the Qurʾān, which is the document of prophethood. What has been said, of course, does not conflict with the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) having been charged with expounding the particulars of the laws and the details of the ordinances of the Sacred Law — which are not to be had from the outward senses of the Glorious Qurʾān — and with their having held the office of teacher of the Book’s teachings, as appears from the verses that follow: “We have sent down the reminder to you so that you may clarify for the people that which has been sent down to them” (16:44); “Take whatever the Apostle gives you, and relinquish whatever he forbids you” (59:7); “We did not send any apostle but to be obeyed by Allah’s leave” (4:64); “It is He who sent to the unlettered [people] an apostle from among themselves, to recite to them

His signs, to purify them, and to teach them the Book and wisdom” (62:2). By these verses the Noble Prophet (ṣ) is the expounder of the particulars and details of the Sacred Law and the divine teacher of the Glorious Qurʾān; and, by the mass-transmitted (mutawātir) ḥadīth of Thaqalayn, the Noble Prophet has set the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt as his successors in the offices named. Nor does this matter conflict with others, too, understanding the intended meaning of the Glorious Qurʾān from the outward senses of its verses, through the exercise of the discernment they have learned from the true teachers.

E. The Glorious Qurʾān Has an Outer and an Inner

God Most High says in His speech: “Worship Allah and do not ascribe any partners to Him” (4:36). The outward sense of this speech is a prohibition of the ordinary worship of idols, as

He says: “So avoid the abomination of idols” (22:30). But upon reflection and analysis it grows clear that idol-worship is forbidden because it is a humbling of oneself and a self-abasement before other than God, and the idol-ness of the object worshipped has no special part in the matter; as God Most High has counted the obeying of Satan as a worship of him, saying: “Did I not exhort you, O children of Adam, saying, ‘Do not worship Satan’” (36:60). And by a further analysis it grows clear that, in obedience and submission, there is for man no difference between himself and another: just as one must not obey another [against God], so one must not obey and follow the desires of one’s own soul over against God Most High — as God Most High indicates: “Have you seen him who has taken his desire to be his god?” (45:23). And by a still finer analysis it grows clear that one ought not, for the sake of any other than God Most High, to turn toward it at all, nor to be heedless of Him; for turning

toward other than God is itself to grant it independence and to show humility and littleness before it — and this [avoidance] is the very spirit of worship and adoration. God Most High says: “Certainly We have created for hell many of the jinn and humans … It is they who are the heedless” (7:179). As may be seen, from the noble verse “and do not ascribe any partners to Him” there is understood, at first, that one must not worship idols; by a wider view, that man must not worship others without God’s leave; by a view wider still, that man must not follow even his own inclination; and by a view wider yet, that he must not be heedless of God and turn toward another.

This same order — the appearing of a simple, initial meaning from a verse, and the appearing of a wider meaning behind it, and so the appearing of meaning beneath meaning — runs throughout the Glorious Qurʾān; and by contemplating these meanings the sense of the well-known ḥadīth, handed down from the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and reported in the books of ḥadīth and of exegesis,

grows clear: “Indeed the Qurʾān has an outer and an inner, and its inner has an inner, up to seven inners.”⁶ According to what has passed, then, the Glorious Qurʾān has an outer and an inner (a ẓāhir and a baṭn) — both of them intended by the speech — save that the two meanings are intended in a vertical order, the one beneath the other, and not side by side: the intending of the word’s outer neither negates the intending of its inner, nor does the intending of the inner encroach upon the intending of the outer.

F. Why the Glorious Qurʾān Speaks by the Two Ways, Outer and Inner

1. In his initial life — which is worldly and temporary — man, like a bubble, has pitched the tent of his being upon the boundless sea of matter, and in all the activities he performs along the course of his existence he is given over to the surging waves of this boundless sea, and has to do with matter. His outward and inward senses are engrossed in matter and material things, and his thoughts, too, are fettered to his sense-knowledge — eating and

drinking, sitting and rising, speaking and hearing, going and coming, moving and resting — in short, all the activities of life he performs upon matter, and he has no thought but this. And when now and then he conceives some of the immaterial things — such as friendship and enmity, loftiness of aspiration, greatness of rank, and their like — most understandings conceive them by picturing material instances: as they render the sweetness of victory by the sweetness of sugar, the attraction of friendship by the pull of a magnet, loftiness of aspiration by height of place or by the station of one of the stars, and greatness of rank by the greatness of a mountain, or the like.

At the same time, understandings differ, and stand at sundry grades, in the power to grasp and to think the immaterial things — which belong to a world wider than matter: there is an understanding whose horizon in conceiving the immaterial is zero; and one a little above it; and so on, until one reaches an understanding that grasps, with the utmost ease, the widest of the non-material meanings. And in every case, the greater an understanding’s power to grasp the immaterial, the less, in that same proportion, is its attachment to the world of matter and its deceiving shows;

and, likewise, the less the attachment, the greater the power to grasp the immaterial. With all this, the individuals of mankind, by the human nature they possess, all have the capacity for this grasp, and — if they do not nullify their own capacity — are fit to be trained.

2. From the foregoing this result is obtained: that the knowledge belonging to each of the various grades of understanding cannot be imposed upon a grade lower than itself — otherwise it will yield the reverse result; and especially the immaterial things, whose level is far above the level of matter and body, if imposed unveiled and stripped bare upon the understanding of the common people, which does not pass beyond sense and the sensed, will altogether defeat the purpose. Here, as an example, the idolatrous religion [of India] may be mentioned: one who reflects deeply upon the Upanishad portion of the Indian Veda, and attends to it — watching every side of its sayings and interpreting some by others — will see that it has no aim but pure monotheism and the worship of the One; yet, alas, because it was set forth unveiled and without wrapping, when the scheme of the unity of the One God ordered in the Upanishads is brought down to the level of common thought, it comes out as nothing but idol-worship and

the confession of many gods. In every case, then, the secrets of what lies beyond nature and matter must be told, from behind a veil, to those bound fast to the world of matter.

3. Whereas in other religions some people are debarred from the religious advantages — as the class of women in the Brahmin, the Jewish, and the Christian religion, and as the debarring of the common people from any share in the teachings of the sacred books in idolatry and in Christianity — Islam allows no debarring whatever in the religious advantages for anyone: the common and the elect, woman and man, black and white, are, in the possibility of attaining the religious privileges, equal before it. As God Most High says: “I do not waste the work of any worker among you, whether male or female; you are all on the same footing” (3:195); and He says: “O mankind! Indeed We created you from a male and a female, and made you nations and tribes that you may identify yourselves with one another. Indeed the noblest of you in the sight of Allah is the most Godwary among you” (49:13).

After stating these premises, we say: the Glorious Qurʾān — in that it has set humanity as such before its eyes in its teaching, holding every human being, insofar as he is human, capable of training and completion — has spread and extended its teaching throughout the world of mankind. And in view of the fact that understandings differ severely in the grasp of the immaterial, and that — as has become known — the imparting of the higher teachings is not safe from peril, it has set its teaching to suit the level of the simplest understandings, which is the understanding of the common people, and has spoken in a plain, universal tongue. This method will, of course, yield this result: that the higher spiritual teachings are voiced in a plain, universal tongue; that the outward senses of the words impart matters and duties of the order of sense and the sensed; and that the immaterial meanings are set behind the veil of those outward senses, showing themselves from behind this veil, each to the measure suited to the differing understandings, so that everyone may profit from them according to his state and the extent of his grasp. God Most High says in His speech: “We have made it an Arabic Qurʾān so that you may apply reason … and indeed it is with Us in the Mother Book, surely sublime and wise” (43:3–4)

— that is, sublime (the hand of human understandings does not reach it) and firm (understandings do not breach it). And again, in a parable He strikes for truth and falsehood and for the capacity of the understandings, He says: “He sends down water from the sky, whereat the valleys are flooded to [the extent of] their capacity” (13:17). And the Noble Prophet (ṣ), in his well-known ḥadīth,⁷ says: “We, the company of prophets, speak to people according to the measure of their intellects.”

A further result yielded by this method is that the statements of the Glorious Qurʾān, in respect of the inner senses they possess, take on the aspect of parable — that is, in respect of the divine teachings, which are far loftier and higher than the level of the ordinary understandings, they are parables struck for

the bringing-near of those teachings to the understandings. God Most High says in His speech: “We have certainly interspersed for the people this Qurʾān with every [kind of] parable, but most people are only intent on ingratitude” (17:89). And again He says: “And We draw these parables for mankind; but no one grasps them except those who have knowledge” (29:43). The Glorious Qurʾān mentions many parables; but the verses above, and what is to this purport, are absolute — and so it must be said that all the statements of the Qurʾān, in respect of the higher teachings that are its real aims, are parables.

G. The Glorious Qurʾān Has the Definitive and the Metaphorical (muḥkam and mutashābih)

God Most High says in His speech: “a Book whose signs have been made definitive” (11:1) — that is, the Qurʾān is a Book whose verses have been made firm and definitive. And again He says: “Allah has sent down

the best of discourses, a scripture [composed] of similar motifs, whereat quiver the skins of those who fear their Lord” (39:23) — a Book whose verses resemble and are like one another, two by two, and at [the hearing of] which the skins of those who fear their Lord shrink and shudder. And again He says: “It is He who has sent down to you the Book. Parts of it are definitive verses, which are the mother of the Book, while others are metaphorical. As for those in whose hearts is deviance, they pursue what is metaphorical in it, courting temptation and courting its interpretation. But no one knows its interpretation except Allah and those firmly grounded in knowledge; they say, ‘We believe in it;

all of it is from our Lord’” (3:7). As is plain, the first verse describes the whole Qurʾān as definitive (muḥkam) — the sense being that the Book is firm, not liable to defect or nullification; and the second verse counts the whole Qurʾān as metaphorical (mutashābih) — the sense being that the Qurʾanic verses are uniform in the beauty of their style, the sweetness of their diction, and the miraculous power of their expression, and the whole Qurʾān has this same character. The third verse — the one in view in this section — divides the Qurʾān into two parts, the definitive and the metaphorical; and, on the whole, it emerges from the surrounding words that:

first, the definitive is a verse firm and settled in its signification, whose intended meaning is not confused with what is not intended, while the metaphorical is its contrary; and second, the duty of faith incumbent upon every believer firmly grounded in his faith is to believe in the definitive verses and to act upon them, and to believe in the metaphorical verses yet to refrain and hold back from acting upon them. Only persons deviant of heart and crooked of thought, with a view to deceiving people and

reaching after [a private] interpretation, act upon the metaphorical verses and follow them.

H. The Meaning of the Definitive and the Metaphorical among the Commentators

Among the scholars of Islam there is a strange disagreement over the meaning of the definitive and the metaphorical: by tracing the various views, one may find nearly twenty opinions on the question. What has practically been current and relied upon among the commentators, from the first age until now, is this: that the definitive verses are those whose intended meaning is plain and is not confused with a meaning not intended — such verses one must believe in and also act upon — while the metaphorical verses are those whose outward sense is not intended, and whose real intended meaning, which is their interpretation (taʾwīl), none knows but God, man having no way to it — such verses one must believe in, but refrain and hold back from following and acting upon them. This is the opinion well known among the scholars of the Sunnis and the Community (ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa); and the well-known opinion among the Shīʿa, too, is this same one, save that they hold that the Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) also know the interpretation of the metaphorical verses, while the generality of the believers,

who have no way to the interpretation of the metaphorical, must refer the knowledge of it to God, the Prophet, and the Imams of guidance.

This opinion, although practically current and relied upon among most commentators, does not accord — on several counts — with the text of the noble verse “It is He who has sent down to you the Book. Parts of it are definitive verses …” nor with the manner of signification of the other Qurʾanic verses. For, first, we know of no verse in the Noble Qurʾān of such a description that there is no way whatever to discern its signification — quite apart from the fact that the Glorious Qurʾān describes itself by such attributes as light, guide, and clarifier, which are never compatible with its verses being mute as to the statement of their own real intent. Moreover, the noble verse “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān? Had it been from [someone] other than Allah, they would have surely found much discrepancy in it” (4:82) makes contemplation of the Qurʾān the remover of every discrepancy — whereas the discrepancy of a metaphorical verse, as the well-known opinion entails, is resolved by no contemplation whatever.

It may be said that what is meant by the metaphorical verses is the very disjoined letters at the openings of the sūras — such as Alif Lām Mīm, Alif Lām Rā, Ḥā Mīm, and the like — for which there is no way to discern their real intent. But it must be borne in mind that the noble verse calls the metaphorical verses “metaphorical” in opposition to “definitive”; and this naming entails that the said verse should have a signification of the kind of verbal significations — save that the real signification is confused with the unreal — whereas the disjoined letters at the openings of the sūras have no verbal signification of this kind. Moreover, the apparent sense of the verse is that a company of the people of deviance and swerving make use of the metaphorical verses in leading people astray and stirring up sedition; and it has not been heard, in Islam, that anyone made such an interpretive use of the disjoined letters at the openings of the sūras — and those who did make such an interpretive use made it from the interpretation of the whole Qurʾān, not from the disjoined letters alone. Some have said that the interpretation of the metaphorical in the verse is an allusion to a well-known story,⁸ according to which the Jews wished, from the disjoined letters

at the beginnings of the sūras to obtain the term of Islam’s endurance and continuance, and the Prophet (ṣ), by reciting the openings of the sūras one after another, confounded their reckoning. This saying, too, is without warrant; for, granting the truth of this story and the soundness of the report, it was a thing some of the Jews said, and in that very session they received their answer — and this event is not of such moment as to have been assigned, in the noble verse, to the matter of the interpretation of the metaphorical and the following of it. Besides, the Jews’ saying carried no sedition in it; for if a religion be true, its being temporary — that is, its being liable to abrogation — does no harm to its truth, as the heavenly religions before Islam were in this very case and yet were true.

Second, this opinion entails that the word “interpretation” (taʾwīl) in the noble verse should mean a signification, a meaning contrary to the apparent one, and should also be peculiar to the metaphorical verses — and both points are untrue; and in the discussion we shall later devote to taʾwīl and tanzīl we shall make it clear that, first, “interpretation” in the idiom of the Qurʾān is not of the kind of a meaning or signification upon which a word has a lexical indication,

and, second, that all the Qurʾanic verses — definitive and metaphorical alike — have an interpretation, not the metaphorical verses only. Third, in the noble verse the phrase “definitive verses” is described by the clause “which are the mother of the Book,” the signification of which is that the definitive verses comprise the mother-matters of the Book, and the matters of the remaining verses are derived from and consequent upon them. And it is a plain entailment of this that the metaphorical verses should be referred back, in respect of signification and intent, to the definitive verses — that is, to clarify the meaning of the metaphorical verses one refers them to the definitive, and by the aid of the definitive finds their real intent. And so, in the Glorious Qurʾān we have no verse to whose real intent there is no access whatever: the Qurʾanic verses are either definitive without mediation, like the definitive themselves, or definitive by mediation, like the metaphorical; while the disjoined letters at the openings of the sūras have no lexical verbal signification at all, and are for that reason outside the division into definitive and metaphorical. This may be gathered from the general import of the verse “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān, or are there locks on the hearts?” (47:24), and likewise the verse “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān

— had it been from [someone] other than Allah, they would have surely found much discrepancy in it” (4:82).⁹

I. The Method of the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) regarding the Definitive and the Metaphorical of the Qurʾān

What emerges from the various statements of the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) is this: that in the Glorious Qurʾān there is no metaphorical in the sense of a verse which yields its real signification by no means whatever; rather, every verse — even if it is not independent in conveying its own real signification — can, by means of other verses, have its real signification arrived at; and this is the very referring of the metaphorical back to the definitive. Thus the verse “The All-beneficent, settled on the Throne” (20:5) and the verse “and your Lord and the angels arrive in ranks” (89:22) are, on their face, [expressions of] corporeality and materiality — the Throne’s “settling” and the Lord’s “coming”; but by referring these two verses to the noble verse “Nothing is like Him” (42:11) it becomes clear that what is meant by the “settling” and the “coming” attributed to God Most High is a meaning other than

settling in a place and passing from place to place. The Noble Prophet (ṣ), describing the Glorious Qurʾān, says:¹⁰ “Indeed the Qurʾān was not sent down that one part of it should belie another, but it was sent down that one part of it should confirm another. So whatever you have understood, act upon it; and whatever has become metaphorical to you, believe in it [only].” And in the words of the Commander of the Faithful (ʿa) it stands:¹¹ “One part of it bears witness over another, and one part of it speaks through another.” And the Sixth Imam (ʿa) says:¹² “The definitive (muḥkam) is that upon which one can act, and the metaphorical (mutashābih) is that which is confused to one who does not know it.”

— and from the report it is gathered that the definitive and the metaphorical are relative, and that a verse may be definitive in relation to one person and metaphorical in relation to another. And from the Eighth Imam (ʿa) it is related that he said:¹³ “Whoever refers the metaphorical of the Qurʾān back to its definitive is guided to a straight path.” Then he said: “Indeed in our reports there is the metaphorical, like the metaphorical of the Qurʾān; so refer their metaphorical back to their definitive, and do not follow their metaphorical, lest you go astray.” As may be observed, the reports — and especially this last narration — are explicit that the metaphorical is a verse which lacks independence in conveying its own signification and which will be made clear by referring it back to the definitive; not that there is no way at all, within reach, to understand its signification.

J. The Glorious Qurʾān Possesses taʾwīl and tanzīl

The expression “the taʾwīl of the Qurʾān” occurs in three verses of the Glorious Qurʾān:

1. The verse of the definitive and the metaphorical, already quoted: “As for those in whose hearts is deviance, they pursue what is metaphorical in it, courting temptation and courting its interpretation [taʾwīl]. But no one knows its interpretation [taʾwīl] except Allah” (3:7).

2. The noble verse: “Do they await anything but its fulfillment [taʾwīl]? The day when its fulfillment [taʾwīl] comes, those who had forgotten it before will say, ‘Our Lord’s apostles had certainly brought the truth’” (7:53).

3. The noble verse: “This Qurʾān could not have been fabricated by anyone besides Allah …

rather, they deny that whose knowledge they do not comprehend, and whose explanation [taʾwīl] has not yet come to them. Those who were before them denied likewise; so observe how was the fate of the wrongdoers!” (10:37, 39).

In any case, “taʾwīl” is from the root awl, meaning “to return”; what is meant by “taʾwīl” is that to which the verse returns, while what is meant by “tanzīl,” as against taʾwīl, is the plain, literal sense of the verse.

K. The Meaning of taʾwīl among the Commentators

There is sharp disagreement over the meaning of taʾwīl, and by tracing the various views one may meet with more than ten opinions; but the two more famous than all the rest are these:

1. The opinion of the ancients (qudamāʾ), who took taʾwīl as synonymous with tafsīr — the settled meaning of the

speech — so that, on this view, all the Qurʾanic verses have a taʾwīl; save that, by the requirement of the verse “no one knows its interpretation [taʾwīl] except Allah” (3:7), the taʾwīl of the metaphorical verses in particular is known to none but God. On this ground a company of the ancients said that the metaphorical verses of the Qurʾān are the very disjoined letters at the openings of the sūras — for in the Glorious Qurʾān there is no verse whose settled meaning is unknown to all people save those disjoined letters. But in the foregoing sections we have made the invalidity of this identification clear.

In any case, seeing that the Glorious Qurʾān withholds from all but God the knowledge of the taʾwīl of certain of its verses, while in the Glorious Qurʾān there is no verse whose taʾwīl — that is, whose settled meaning — is unknown to all, and the disjoined letters at the openings of the sūras cannot be recognized as “metaphorical” either, this opinion has been reckoned invalid by the later scholars and has been abandoned.

2. The opinion of the later scholars (mutaʾakhkhirūn), that “taʾwīl” is a meaning contrary to the apparent one which is intended by the speech — so that, on this view, not all the Qurʾanic verses have a taʾwīl; only the metaphorical verses possess a taʾwīl and a meaning contrary to the apparent, over which none but God has comprehension —

such as the verses that ascribe to God corporeality, coming, sitting, contentment, wrath, regret, and the other concomitants of materiality, and the verses that ascribe disobedience to the messengers of God and to the sinless prophets.

This school has become so current in practice that the word “taʾwīl,” in the sense of the contrary-to-apparent, has now become a secondary literal usage; and the taʾwīl of the Qurʾanic verses, in theological disputation — that is, the diverting of speech from its apparent sense and its bearing upon a sense contrary to the apparent, on the strength of some evidence — has become a current method under the name of taʾwīl, though the method is itself not free of contradiction.¹⁴

This opinion, too, for all its considerable fame, is incorrect and does not fit the Qurʾanic verses. For: first, the verse of Sūrat al-Aʿrāf, “Do they await anything but its fulfillment [taʾwīl]?” and the verse of Sūrat Yūnus, “rather, they deny that whose knowledge they do not comprehend, and whose explanation [taʾwīl] has not yet come to them,” both quoted in the foregoing section, are plain in this: that the whole Qurʾān has a taʾwīl, not the metaphorical verses only, as this opinion

would have it.

Second, this opinion entails that there should exist in the Glorious Qurʾān verses whose real signification is confused and unknown to people, of which none but God is cognizant; and speech that is mute in the conveying of its intended meaning cannot be reckoned eloquent — let alone speech that, by its very eloquence, challenges the world of discourse and proclaims its own supremacy.

Third, on this opinion the proof of the Qurʾān is not completed; for, by the argument of the noble verse “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān? Had it been from [someone] other than Allah, they would have surely found much discrepancy in it,” one of the proofs that the Qurʾān is not the speech of man is that among its verses — despite the sharp differences of the times, conditions, and circumstances that attended their descent — there is no discrepancy whatever of meaning and signification, and any discrepancy that shows itself at first glance is removed by contemplating the verses. Now if a considerable quantity of verses, called “metaphorical,” were to stand in discrepancy with the settled parts of the Qurʾān, which are the definitive, and the discrepancy were removed by saying that their apparent senses are not intended

but rather some other meanings of which none but God is cognizant — such a removal of discrepancy would in no way prove that the Qurʾān is not the speech of man. And likewise, if we removed the discrepancy by diverting every verse whose content opposes and contradicts the definitive and settled parts of the Qurʾān from its apparent sense and bearing it (in the terminology of this opinion) upon a taʾwīl in the sense of the contrary-to-apparent — for by this kind of taʾwīl any contradiction whatever can be removed, even from the speech of man.

Fourth, there is simply no evidence that what is meant by taʾwīl in the verse of the definitive and the metaphorical is a meaning contrary to the apparent; and in the other Qurʾanic verses where the name of taʾwīl is brought, no such meaning is intended. For example, in three places in the story of Joseph (ʿa) the interpretation of a dream is called “taʾwīl”; and plainly the interpretation of a dream is not the contrary-to-apparent meaning of the dream, but an external, objective reality seen in the dream in a particular form.¹⁵

And likewise, in the story of Moses and Khiḍr¹⁶ in Sūrat al-Kahf — after Khiḍr bores a hole in the ship, and then slays a boy, and then sets straight a leaning wall, Moses (ʿa) objecting at each stage — Khiḍr, coming to the answer, states the reality and the true purpose of the deeds he had done at God’s command, and calls it their taʾwīl. And plainly the reality of the deed and its true purpose — which appeared in the form of the deed and is, as it were, the spirit of the deed — is what is called “taʾwīl,” not the contrary-to-apparent meaning of it.

And likewise God Most High says, concerning weight and measure: “When you measure, observe fully the measure, [and] weigh with an even balance. That is better and fairer in outcome [taʾwīl]” (17:35). Plainly what is meant by the taʾwīl of measure and weight is a particular economic order that arises in the market of exchange, in the movement and transfer of life’s needs; and “taʾwīl” in this sense is not the contrary-to-apparent meaning of measure and weight, but an external, spiritual reality breathed into the frame of measure and weight, by whose soundness or unsoundness they become, in their effects, potent or impotent.

And likewise He says elsewhere: “And if you dispute concerning anything, refer it to Allah and the Apostle … That is better and more favourable in outcome [taʾwīl]” (4:59). Plainly what is meant by the “taʾwīl” of referring the dispute to God and the Apostle is the very endurance of the community’s unity and the firmness of the spiritual bond within the community; and this is a reality

that is external, not the contrary-to-apparent meaning of “resolving the dispute.”

And likewise the other places where the word taʾwīl is mentioned in the Glorious Qurʾān — sixteen places in all, with those already named — in none of them can taʾwīl be taken in the sense of “a signification contrary to the apparent”; rather it is in another sense (as will become clear in the coming section), a sense that also fits the word taʾwīl as it occurs in the verse of the definitive and the metaphorical. And this being so, there is no ground for taking the word taʾwīl in that verse in the sense of “a signification contrary to the apparent.”

L. What taʾwīl Means in the Idiom of the Qurʾān

What is gathered from the verses in which the word taʾwīl occurs — some of which we have quoted in the foregoing sections — is that taʾwīl is not of the kind of meaning that is a word’s signification. As is plain, in the dreams related and interpreted in Sūrat Yūsuf, no word describing the dream has any verbal indication of the dream’s taʾwīl — even a contrary-to-apparent one.

And likewise, in the stories of Moses and Khiḍr, the words of the stories have no indication of the taʾwīl that Khiḍr gave to Moses. And likewise, in the verse “When you measure, observe fully the measure, [and] weigh with an even balance,” these two clauses have no verbal indication of the particular economic order that is the taʾwīl of the command. And likewise, in the verse “And if you dispute concerning anything, refer it to Allah and the Apostle,” there is no verbal indication of its taʾwīl, which is Islamic unity; and if we look closely at the other verses, the matter is the same throughout.

Rather, in the case of the dreams, the taʾwīl of the dream is an external reality that showed itself to the dreamer in a particular form; and likewise, in the story of Moses and Khiḍr, the taʾwīl that Khiḍr states is a reality from which the deeds he performed spring, and the deed itself is in some manner charged with its own taʾwīl; and in the verse commanding the right measure and weight, its taʾwīl is a general reality and welfare on which this command leans and which the command in some manner brings to realization; and in the verse of referring the dispute to God and the Apostle it is likewise.

The taʾwīl of anything, then, is a reality from which that thing springs, the thing being in some manner its realizer, its bearer, and its sign — just as the possessor of a taʾwīl is the living taʾwīl, and the appearing of the taʾwīl is with the possessor of the taʾwīl.

This meaning holds in the Glorious Qurʾān too; for this sacred book springs from a set of realities and immaterial meanings that are free of the bond of matter and corporeality, higher than the plane of sense and the sensed, and far wider than the mould of the words and expressions that are the product of our material life. In their reality these realities and immaterial meanings do not fit into the mould of verbal expression; all that has come from the presence of the Unseen is that, by these words, mankind has been given an alertness, so that by the outward of true beliefs and righteous deeds they may make themselves fit to grasp a happiness that has no way to be grasped except by witnessing and beholding; and it is on the Day of Resurrection and the meeting with God that these realities become fully clear and manifest — as the two verses of Sūrat al-Aʿrāf and the verse of Sūrat Yūnus indicated.

God Most High, alluding to this meaning, says: “We have made it an Arabic Qurʾān so that you may apply reason … and indeed it is with Us in the Mother Book, surely sublime and wise” (43:3–4) — sublime (the hand of ordinary understanding does not reach it) and firm (it cannot be breached).

The fitting of the verse’s end to taʾwīl in the sense stated is plain, and the more so from His saying “so that you may apply reason” and not “so that you may reason it out”; for the knowledge of taʾwīl, as the verse of the definitive and the metaphorical rules (“no one knows its interpretation except Allah”), belongs to God alone. And for this same reason, when in that verse He censures the people of deviance for following the metaphorical, He says that by this following they seek sedition and seek its taʾwīl — and He does not say that they find it. The taʾwīl of the Qurʾān, then, is a reality, or realities, in the Mother Book with God, and belongs to the peculiarities of the Unseen.

And again, to nearly the same purport, He says elsewhere: “So I swear by the places where the stars set! And indeed it is a great oath, should you know. This is indeed a noble Qurʾān, in a guarded Book — no one touches it except the pure ones — gradually sent down [tanzīl] from the Lord of all the worlds” (56:75–80).

As is plain, these noble verses establish for the Qurʾān two stations: the station of the guarded Book (kitāb maknūn), immune from the touch of any toucher; and the station of the tanzīl, which is comprehensible to people. What is gathered from these verses, over and above the foregoing, is the exception “except the pure ones” — by whose warrant certain persons are able to reach the reality and the taʾwīl of the Noble Qurʾān; and this affirmation does not conflict with the negation that follows from the verse “no one knows its interpretation except Allah,”

for the joining of the two verses yields a relation of independence and dependence: that is, it conveys that God Most High is independent in the knowledge of these realities, and that none but He will know these realities save by His leave and His teaching. It is like the knowledge of the Unseen, which by many verses is peculiar to God Most High, while in one verse His approved ones are excepted: “Knower of the Unseen, He does not disclose His Unseen to anyone, except to an apostle He approves of” (72:26–27); and from the whole of the passage it is concluded that the knowledge of the Unseen belongs, by way of independence, to God, and befits none but Him save by His leave.

Yes — the pure ones (al-muṭahharūn), by the indication of these verses, touch the reality of the Qurʾān; and by the joining to them of the noble verse “Indeed Allah desires to repel all impurity from you, O People of the Household, and purify you with a thorough purification” (33:33) — which, by mass-transmitted reports, was sent down concerning the Ahl al-Bayt of the Prophet (ṣ) — the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the House of prophethood (ʿa) are among the pure ones and are knowers of the taʾwīl of the Qurʾān.

M. The Glorious Qurʾān Has the Abrogating and the Abrogated (nāsikh and mansūkh)

Among the verses of the ordinances in the Qurʾān there are verses that, after their descent, take the place of the ruling of verses previously sent down and acted upon, and bring to an end the time of the earlier ruling’s validity; the earlier verses are called “abrogated” (mansūkh), and the later verses, which rule over them in their own ruling, are called “abrogating” (nāsikh). Thus, at the beginning of the mission

the Muslims were directed to live in peace with the People of the Book, as He says: “Yet excuse [them] and forbear until Allah issues His edict” (2:109); and after a time the verse of fighting (qitāl) came and put an end to the ruling of peace, as He says: “Fight those who do not have faith in Allah nor [believe] in the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and His Apostle have forbidden, nor practise the true religion, from among those who were given the Book” (9:29).

Now the reality of the abrogation (naskh) current among us is this: that a ruling is laid down and put into practice in view of some interest, and after a time [the legislator] becomes aware of his error and mistake, annuls the first ruling, and puts another in its place; and abrogation in this sense — which is bound up with ignorance and error — cannot be ascribed to God Most High, to whose pure sanctity ignorance and error have no way; and such a ruling does not exist in the Glorious Qurʾān, among whose verses there is no discrepancy

whatever.

Rather, abrogation in the Glorious Qurʾān is the announcement of the end of the time of the abrogated ruling’s validity — in the sense that the interest in enacting and laying down the first ruling was a limited and temporary interest, so that naturally its effect too, which is the ruling, comes out limited and temporary; and after a time a second ruling appears and announces the expiry of the term of the first ruling’s validity. And in view of the fact that the Glorious Qurʾān was sent down gradually over twenty-three years, its comprising such rulings is entirely conceivable. Of course, the laying down of a temporary ruling in a place where the requisite of a fixed and complete ruling is not yet present, and its replacement by a fixed ruling once the requisite is complete, will present no difficulty — as the same sense is gathered from the Glorious Qurʾān concerning the wisdom of abrogation. God Most High says: “When We change a sign with another in its place —and Allah knows best what He sends down— they say, ‘You are just a fabricator.’ Rather most of them do not know. Say, the Holy Spirit has brought it down duly from your Lord

to fortify those who have faith and as a guidance and good news for the muslims” (16:101–102).

N. Application and Adaptation in the Glorious Qurʾān (jary)

In view of the fact that the Glorious Qurʾān is a universal and perpetual book, it runs in the absent as in the present and applies to the future and the past as to the present. Thus verses that lay duties upon the believers of the age of descent under particular conditions lay exactly the same duties, without the least diminution, upon believers who, after the age of descent, possess those same conditions; and verses that praise, or reproach, or give glad tidings to, or warn the possessors of certain traits include all who are characterized by those traits, in whatever time and place they be. Accordingly, the occasion of a verse’s descent is never a restrictor of that verse; that is, a verse sent down concerning some particular person or persons

is not frozen upon its own occasion of descent, but extends to every case that shares, in its traits and characteristics, in the occasion of the verse’s descent; and this property is the very thing called, in the idiom of the reports, “jary” (application).

The Fifth Imam (ʿa), in a report, says:¹⁷ were it so that, when a verse was sent down concerning a people and then that people died, the verse too should die, nothing of the Qurʾān would remain; but the whole Qurʾān runs on as long as the heavens and the earth endure, and for every people there is a verse which they recite and from which they take a portion, for good or ill. And in some reports¹⁸ the inner (baṭn) of the Qurʾān — that is, the application of the Qurʾān to cases arrived at by analysis — is reckoned to be of the kind of jary.

O. The Interpretation of the Qurʾān’s Words, and Its Origin and Development

The interpretation and elucidation of the words and expressions of the Glorious Qurʾān began from the age of descent, and the person of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) occupied himself with teaching the Qurʾān and explaining

the meanings and purposes of its noble verses, as God Most High says: “We have sent down the reminder to you so that you may clarify for the people that which has been sent down to them” (16:44); and He says: “It is He who sent to the unlettered [people] an apostle from among themselves, to recite to them His signs, to purify them, and to teach them the Book and wisdom” (62:2). In his time, by his command, a company occupied themselves with reciting, recording, and memorizing the Qurʾān, who were called the reciters (qurrāʾ); and after the passing of that Ḥaḍrat, his Companions — and after them the rest of the Muslims — occupied themselves with the exegesis of the Qurʾān, and do so to this day.

P. The Science of Exegesis and the Classes of the Commentators

[The First Class — the Companions]

After the passing of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), a company of the Companions

— such as Ubayy b. Kaʿb, ʿAbd Allāh b. Masʿūd, Jābir b. ʿAbd Allāh, Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī, ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr, ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar, Anas, Abū Hurayra, Abū Mūsā, and, most famous of all, ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbbās — occupied themselves with exegesis.

Their method in exegesis was that sometimes they related, as a supported (musnad) report, what they had heard from the Noble Prophet (ṣ) concerning the meanings of the Qurʾanic verses.¹⁹ These traditions, from the beginning to the end of the Qurʾān, number in all some two hundred and forty-odd; the chains of many of them are weak and the texts of some are objectionable. And sometimes they conveyed the interpretation of verses as an expression of their own opinion, without ascribing it to the Noble Prophet (ṣ).

The later Sunnī exegetes count this kind, too, among the Prophetic reports in exegesis, since the Companions learned the knowledge of the Qurʾān from the station of prophethood, and it is unlikely that they said anything of their own. But there is no decisive proof of this; besides, a large part of this kind consists of reports that have come down about the occasions of the descent

of the verses and their historical narratives; and likewise, among these Companion-reports, many of the sayings of the Jewish scholars who had become Muslims — such as Kaʿb al-Aḥbār and others — are found without any chain. Ibn ʿAbbās, too, often, in [giving] the meaning of verses, cited poetry by way of illustration; thus in the report related from Ibn ʿAbbās in the questions of Nāfiʿ b. al-Azraq he answers some two hundred-odd questions by citing Arabic verse, and Suyūṭī in al-Itqān²⁰ relates one hundred and ninety of them. Even so, the reports that have come from the Companion-exegetes cannot be reckoned Prophetic reports, nor can the exercise of [personal] view be denied of the Companions. The Companion-exegetes have been taken as the people of the first class.

The Second Class — the Company of the Successors (Tābiʿūn)

who are the students of the Companion-exegetes, such as Mujāhid²¹ and Saʿīd b. Jubayr, and

ʿIkrima and al-Ḍaḥḥāk; and of this class are al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, ʿAṭāʾ b. Abī Rabāḥ, ʿAṭāʾ b. Abī Muslim, Abū l-ʿĀliya, Muḥammad b. Kaʿb al-Quraẓī,

Qatāda, ʿAṭiyya, Zayd b. Aslam, and Ṭāwūs al-Yamānī.

The Third Class — the Students of the Second Class

such as Rabīʿ b. Anas, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Zayd b. Aslam, Abū Ṣāliḥ al-Kalbī, and their like.²² The method of the Successors in exegesis was that they sometimes related the interpretation of verses in the form of a report from the Noble Prophet (ṣ) or the Companions, and sometimes brought forward the meaning of a verse as an expression of their own view, without ascribing it to anyone; and the later exegetes treat these sayings, too, as Prophetic reports, reckoning them “suspended” (mawqūf) reports.²³ The term “the ancient exegetes” (qudamāʾ) is applied to these two classes.

The Fourth Class — the First Authors of Exegesis

such as

Sufyān b. ʿUyayna, Wakīʿ b. al-Jarrāḥ, Shuʿba b. al-Ḥajjāj, ʿAbd b. Ḥumayd, and others; and of this class is Ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī,²⁴ author of the famous commentary. The method of this class, too, was of this kind: that they entered the sayings of the Companions and Successors, in the form of chained (muʿanʿan) reports, into their exegetical compositions, and refrained from [expressing] their own independent view — save that Ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, in his commentary, sometimes expresses a view in preferring among the sayings; and the class of the later ones begins from this group.

The Fifth Class

are those who inserted the reports into their compositions with the chains omitted, and contented themselves merely with relating the sayings

[of the earlier authorities]. Some scholars²⁵ have said that the disordering of the fabric of exegesis began from this very point: that many sayings were ascribed, in these commentaries, to the Companions and Successors without regard for the soundness and reliability of the transmission or the verification of the chain back to the Companions and Successors; and that through this chaos much interpolation arose and the authority of the sayings became unsteady. But anyone who reflects closely on the chained (muʿanʿan) exegetical reports will not doubt that interpolation and forgery are rife among them too: many mutually repelling and contradictory sayings are ascribed to a single Companion or Successor; tales and stories of certain falsehood are seen in abundance among these reports; and the occasions of descent, and the abrogating and abrogated, that do not accord with the flow of the verses are not one or two, that might be overlooked. Hence Imām Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (who was himself before the appearance of this class) said: three things have no foundation (aṣl) — the campaigns (maghāzī), the [tales of] battles (malāḥim), and the reports of exegesis. And it is related from al-Shāfiʿī that only about a hundred ḥadīths are established from Ibn ʿAbbās.

The Sixth Class

are the exegetes who arose after the appearance of the various sciences and their ripening within Islam, the specialists in each science approaching exegesis by way of their own particular discipline: the grammarian by way of grammar — such as al-Zajjāj, al-Wāḥidī, and Abū Ḥayyān,²⁶ who discussed the parsing (iʿrāb) of the verses; the rhetorician by way of eloquence and clarity — such as al-Zamakhsharī in al-Kashshāf; the theologian by way of kalām — such as Fakhr al-Rāzī in al-Tafsīr al-Kabīr; the gnostic (ʿārif) by way of mysticism — such as Ibn ʿArabī and ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshī in their commentaries; and the traditionist (akhbārī) by way of relating reports — such as

al-Thaʿlabī in his commentary; and the jurist by way of jurisprudence — such as al-Qurṭubī in his commentary. A number, too, wrote commentaries of a mixed character, [drawing] from the various sciences — such as the Tafsīr Rūḥ al-Bayān, the Tafsīr Rūḥ al-Maʿānī, and the Tafsīr al-Nīsābūrī.

The service of this class to the world of exegesis was that they brought the discipline of exegesis out of the frozen, stagnant state it had held in the five earlier classes, and led it into the stage of inquiry and reflection — although anyone who looks with a fair eye will see that in most of this class’s exegetical discussions the scientific views were imposed upon the Qurʾān,

and the Qurʾanic verses themselves were not made to speak from their own contents.

Q. The Method of the Shīʿī Commentators and Their Classes

The classes just mentioned were the classes of the Sunnī commentators, and their origin is a particular method taken up in exegesis from the very first day — namely, the treating of the sayings of the Companions and Successors on a par with the Prophetic report, so that the exercise of [personal] view against them was reckoned of the kind of ijtihād against a text (naṣṣ) — until the disordering of these reports, and the coming to light of the contradiction, interpolation, and forgery among them, permitted the sixth class of commentators to exercise [independent] view.

But the method the Shīʿa have adopted in the exegesis of the Qurʾān is other than this method, and consequently, with the difference of method, the classification of the commentators takes on another aspect as well. The Shīʿa, by the text of the Glorious Qurʾān, hold the saying of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) to be a proof (ḥujja) in the exegesis of the Qurʾanic verses, and grant no authority whatever to the sayings of the Companions and Successors — as [they grant none to those of] the rest of the Muslims — except by way of a report from the Noble Prophet (ṣ); save that, by the text of the mass-transmitted report of

Thaqalayn, they hold the saying of the ʿitra and the Ahl al-Bayt to be next to, and like, the saying of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) as a proof. Hence, in transmitting and receiving exegetical reports, they have confined themselves to the reports related from the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa), and have formed their classes in the following order.

The First Class — Those Who Received the Exegetical Reports from the Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt

and recorded them, unarranged, in their compilations (uṣūl), devoting themselves to relating them — such as Zurāra, Muḥammad b. Muslim, Maʿrūf, Jarīr, and their like.²⁷

The Second Class — the People of the First Compilations of Exegesis

such as Furāt b. Ibrāhīm, Abū Ḥamza al-Thumālī, al-ʿAyyāshī,²⁸ ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Qummī,

and al-Nuʿmānī, author of a commentary. The method of this class — like the fourth class of the Sunnī commentators — was that they entered the transmitted reports received from the first class, with their chains, into their compilations, and refrained from any exercise of [personal] view. And in view of the fact that the time of access to the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) was long, lasting nearly three hundred years, these two classes naturally had no [distinct] temporal order and overlapped one another; likewise those who inserted the reports with the chains omitted were very few. As an example in this matter one should name the extant Tafsīr al-ʿAyyāshī: one of al-ʿAyyāshī’s students abridged, from al-ʿAyyāshī’s composition, the chains of the reports, and his copy became current in place of al-ʿAyyāshī’s.

The Third Class — the Class of the Masters of the Various Sciences

such as

al-Sayyid al-Raḍī²⁹ in his literary commentary; Shaykh al-Ṭūsī in his theological commentary, which is al-Tibyān; Ṣadr al-Mutaʾallihīn al-Shīrāzī in his philosophical commentaries; Maybudī [and] Gūnābādī in his mystical commentary; Shaykh ʿAbd ʿAlī al-Ḥuwayzī, al-Sayyid Hāshim al-Baḥrānī, and Fayḍ al-Kāshānī in the Tafsīr Nūr al-Thaqalayn, al-Burhān, and al-Ṣāfī; and those who have gathered several sciences together in their commentaries —

such as Shaykh al-Ṭabrisī in the Tafsīr Majmaʿ al-Bayān, which inquires by the various avenues of lexicon, grammar, recitation, kalām, and ḥadīth.

R. How the Qurʾān Itself Admits of Interpretation

The answer to this question is plain from the foregoing sections. For, on the one hand, the Glorious Qurʾān is a universal and perpetual book, which addresses all and guides them to its purposes, which comes to all in the posture of challenge and argument, and which introduces itself as light, illuminator, and expounder of all things; and of course such a thing must not, in its own illumination, stand in need of others. And, in the posture of arguing that it is not the speech of man, it says³⁰ that the Qurʾān is a uniform speech in which there is no discrepancy, and any discrepancy that appears is resolved by contemplating

the Qurʾān itself, and had it not been the speech of God it would not have been so. And if such a speech, in the illumination of its own purposes, needed something or someone else, this proof would not be complete. For if an opponent were to find a point of discrepancy that was not resolved by way of the Qurʾān’s own verbal signification but by some way other than the wording — such as being referred to the Noble Prophet (ṣ), who, without any witness from the Qurʾān’s wording, should say that the verse’s meaning is such-and-such — then an opponent who does not believe in that Ḥaḍrat’s inerrancy and truthfulness would not be persuaded. In other words, the Prophet’s explanation and removal of discrepancy without a verbal witness from the Qurʾān serves only one who already believes in his prophethood and inerrancy; whereas the addressee and the party of the argument in the verse “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān? Had it been from [someone] other than Allah, they would have surely found much discrepancy in it” are the opponents of the summons, who do not believe in his prophethood and inerrancy, and to whom his saying, without a Qurʾanic witness, is not established. And, on the other hand, the Qurʾān itself gives authority to the explanation and exegesis of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), and the Noble Prophet [gives authority] to the explanation and exegesis of his Ahl al-Bayt.

The result of these two premises is that in the Glorious Qurʾān some verses are interpreted by others, and that the position of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and his Ahl al-Bayt, over against the Qurʾān, is the position of inerrant teachers who never err in their teaching; and necessarily the interpretation they give will not conflict with the interpretation that really results from the joining of the verses to one another.

S. The Conclusion of the Discussion

The result obtained from the foregoing section is that the real interpretation of the Qurʾān is the interpretation that is obtained from contemplating the verses and seeking the aid, for a verse, of the other related verses. In other words, in the exegesis of the Qurʾanic verses we have one of three ways before us:

1. Interpreting the verse by itself, with the scientific and non-scientific premises we have with us.

2. Interpreting the verse by the aid of a report that has come, concerning it, from an inerrant one.

3. Interpreting the verse with the aid of contemplation and the eliciting of its meaning from the totality of the related verses, drawing on reports where possible.

The third way is the very method we deduced in the foregoing section, and it is the method to which the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and his Ahl al-Bayt pointed in their teachings — as the Noble Prophet (ṣ) says, “it was sent down only that one part of it should confirm another,” and the Commander of the Faithful says, “one part of it speaks through another, and one part of it bears witness over another.” And from the foregoing it is plain that this method is other than the one forbidden in the well-known Prophetic ḥadīth “Whoever interprets the Qurʾān by his own opinion, let him take his seat in the Fire” — for in this method the Qurʾān is interpreted by the Qurʾān, not by the interpreter’s opinion.

The first way is not reliable, and is in truth of the kind of interpretation by opinion, except where it accords with the third way.

The second way is the method the exegetes had in the first age of Islam, current and acted upon for centuries (as was mentioned in the foregoing sections), and it is still practised among the Akhbārīs of the Sunnis and the Shīʿa. It is a method limited over against an unlimited need; for beneath the six thousand and some hundred Qurʾanic verses we have hundreds and thousands of scientific and non-scientific questions — whence are the answers to these questions, and the solution of these knots and difficulties, to be obtained? Must one refer to the reports? — when what is given the name of a Prophetic report, by the routes of the Sunnis, does not reach two hundred and fifty ḥadīths (quite apart from the fact that many are weak and some objectionable); and if we bring into view the reports of the Ahl al-Bayt that have come by the Shīʿī routes, they do indeed reach thousands, and among them a considerable amount of reliable ḥadīth is found — yet in any case they do not suffice against the unlimited questions; besides, there are many Qurʾanic verses beneath which no ḥadīth at all has come, by either the general or the particular route.

Or must one, in these difficulties, return to the fitting verses — which on this method is forbidden? Or refrain from inquiry altogether and disregard the scientific need? — in which case what meaning would the verse “We have sent down the Book to you as a clarification of all things” (16:89), with its indication clearer than the sun, retain? And what would the phrase “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān?” (4:82; 47:24), and the verse “[It is] a blessed Book that We have sent down to you, so that they may contemplate its signs, and that those who possess intellect may take admonition” (38:29), and the verse “Have they not contemplated the discourse, or has anything come to them [in it] that did not come to their forefathers?” (23:68), signify? And what effect would the established ḥadīths that have come from the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa), recommending and urging people to refer to the Glorious Qurʾān in difficulties and seditions,³¹ then have?

Fundamentally, on this method the matter of contemplating the Qurʾān — which, by the requirement of many verses, is a universal duty — would have no place. And likewise, by the general route in a ḥadīth of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), and by the particular route in mass-transmitted reports³² from the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa), the presenting of reports to the Book of God has been made a duty: by these reports, a ḥadīth must be presented to the Book of God; if it agrees with the Book it is taken and acted upon, and if it disagrees it is discarded. Plainly the content of these reports will be sound only when the Qurʾanic verse has an indication of its own meaning, and the settled meaning of it — which is the interpretation of the verse — has validity; and if the settled meaning of the verse (its interpretation) were to be determined by the report, then the presenting of the report to the Book would have no settled meaning. These reports are the best witness that the verses of the Glorious Qurʾān, like all other speech, indicate a meaning, and that their indication, independently of the report, is a proof.

What became clear, then, from the foregoing discussions is that

the duty of the exegete is to pass over and delve into the ḥadīths of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) that have come in the exegesis of the Qurʾān, and to become acquainted with their method; then, according to the instruction gathered from the Book and the Sunna, to undertake the exegesis of the Qurʾān, and, from the reports that have come in the exegesis of a verse, to take what agrees with the content of the verse.

T. An Example of the Exegesis of the Qurʾān by the Qurʾān

God Most High says, in several places of His speech: “Allah is creator of all things” (39:62) — this content is repeated in four places in the Qurʾān, and by it whatever is supposed in the world of creation is a creature of God and its being is from Him. Of course, one must not be heedless of this point: that the Qurʾān, in hundreds of verses, affirms causality, ascribes the act of every agent to that agent itself, and reckons the effects of things — such as the burning of fire, the sprouting of the earth, and the raining of the sky — as belonging to them,

and writes man’s voluntary acts to man’s own account. Consequently the doer of every deed is indeed the owner of that deed, but the giver of being to the deed and to its owner is God, and God alone. And after this generalization it gave to creation, He says: “who perfected everything that He created” (32:7) — and, by joining this verse to the foregoing, beauty and creation advance side by side, and whatever in the world of being has being has beauty, and has no attribute but beauty.

Nor must one be heedless of this: that the Qurʾān, in many verses, affirms good against evil, benefit against harm, and likewise the fair against the foul, reckoning many acts and deeds and phenomena as evil and foul; but the point is that all these evils and fouls and disagreeable things arise by way of relation and comparison, and have a relative, comparative existence, not an intrinsic one. The snake and the scorpion, for instance, are evil — but in relation to man and the animals harmed by their sting, not in relation to stone and earth.

A bitter taste and the smell of carrion are loathsome — but in relation to the taste and the smell of man, not in relation to all. Certain behaviours and deeds are foul — but in relation to man’s social order, not in every order, and not disregarding the social order. Yes: if for a moment one sets relation and comparison aside, one’s hand will fall upon nothing but a beautiful form and an astounding, dazzling being; and the display of the beauty of the world of being is beyond the power of description and expression — for description and expression are themselves among the beautiful things of the world of being.

In truth, the noble verse named wishes to turn people’s faces away from the relative and comparative foul and fair, and to direct them toward absolute beauty, and to equip the understandings with a universal, general view. After receiving this teaching, we come upon hundreds of Qurʾanic verses that, in various statements, introduce the beings of the world of being — one by one, group by group, and the partial and universal orders that rule within them — as a sign and mark of God Most High, and reckon them, from every aspect that may be supposed (let it be well pondered), as pointing to God Most High.

From these statements, taken together with the two foregoing verses, we understand that this astounding beauty, which has seized the whole world of being from both sides, is indeed the beauty of the Court of Grandeur (sāḥat-i kibriyāʾ), beheld by way of the heavenly and earthly signs; and that each of the parts of the world is a window that displays a portion of the pleasing, boundless expanse beyond itself, and that none has anything of its own. Hence the Noble Qurʾān, in other verses, reckons every beauty and perfection as belonging to that Court of Grandeur, as He says: “He is the Living One, there is no god except Him” (40:65); “power, altogether, belongs to Allah” (2:165); “indeed all honour belongs to Allah” (4:139); “and He is the All-knowing, the All-powerful” (30:54); “and He is the All-hearing, the All-seeing” (42:11); “Allah — there is no god except Him — to Him belong the Best Names” (20:8). By the requirement of these verses, all the beauties that are displayed in the world of being —

their reality belongs to that Court of Grandeur, and for others nothing remains but the metaphorical and the borrowed. In confirmation of this statement, the Glorious Qurʾān explains, by another statement, that the beauty and perfection in each of the world’s creatures is bounded and finite, and its unbounded and infinite [measure] is with God: “Indeed We have created everything in a measure” (54:49); “There is not a thing but that its sources are with Us, and We do not send it down except in a known measure” (15:21).

By accepting this Qurʾanic reality, man will at once see himself before an infinite beauty and perfection that encompasses him on every side, before which there is no void; and he will consign to oblivion every beauty and perfection — even himself, who is one of those signs — and become enraptured and enamoured, as He says: “but the faithful have a more ardent love for Allah” (2:165).

And here it is that — as is the requisite and the property of love and affection — he surrenders his independence and his will to God Most High, goes under His absolute guardianship, and comes under the walāya of God, as He says: “and Allah is the guardian of the faithful” (3:68); and God Most High, too, as He has promised, takes charge of managing and leading him: “Allah is the Guardian of the faithful: He brings them out of darkness into light” (2:257). And by the noble verse “Is he who was lifeless, then We gave him life and provided him with a light by which he walks among the people” (6:122), and the verse “such, He has written faith into their hearts and strengthened them with a spirit from Him” (58:22), He grants him another spirit

and another life, and appoints for him a light — a special perception of realism — by which he discerns the course of a felicitous life in society. And in another verse He explains the way of acquiring this light: “O you who have faith! Be wary of Allah and have faith in His Apostle. He will grant you a double share of His mercy and give you a light to walk by” (57:28). And He has interpreted faith in the Noble Prophet (ṣ), in other verses, as submission to him and the following of him, as He says: “Say, ‘If you love Allah, then follow me; Allah will love you’” (3:31); and He explains the ground of the following in another verse: “those who follow the Apostle, the uninstructed prophet, whose mention they find written with them in the Torah and the Evangel, who bids them to do what is right and forbids them from what is wrong, makes lawful to them all the good things and forbids them from all vicious things, and relieves them of their burdens and the shackles that were upon them”

(7:157); and, more plainly than this statement, He explains the ground of the following in another verse, which is also the interpreter of this one: “So set your heart on the religion as a people of pure faith, according to which He originated mankind. There is no altering Allah’s creation; that is the upright religion” (30:30). By the requirement of this verse, the complete program of Islam is the demands of creation — in other words, the sacred laws and ordinances to which the primordial nature and creation of man guide man (the unspoiled life of a natural man),

as He says elsewhere: “by the soul and Him who fashioned it, and inspired it with [discernment between] its virtues and vices: one who purifies it is felicitous, and one who betrays it fails” (91:7–10). The Qurʾān is the only heavenly book that, first, reckons the felicitous human life as equal to the unspoiled, pure life of the primordial (natural) man, and, second — contrary to most or all methods, which sever the program of God-worship from the program of life — sets the religious program as the very program of life, intervening in all the individual and social affairs of man and issuing instructions in accord with realism (worldview, knowledge of God); in truth, it commits individuals to the world and the world to individuals, and both to God. The Noble Qurʾān mentions many effects and properties, formal and spiritual, belonging to the men of God and the friends of the truth in the certainty (yaqīn) they possess, which this section has no room to set out in detail.

U. The Meaning of the Authority of the Exposition of the Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams (ʿa)

By the indication of the Glorious Qurʾān itself, the exposition of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and

his noble Ahl al-Bayt — as passed in the foregoing sections — has authority in the exegesis of the Qurʾanic verses. This authority is plain in the case of the oral and explicit saying of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt, and likewise in the reports of certain provenance (qaṭʿī al-ṣudūr) that relate their exposition. But the report of uncertain [provenance] — which in the terminology is called the “single report” (khabar wāḥid), and whose authority is disputed among the Muslims — depends upon the view of the one who undertakes the exegesis. Among the Sunnis they generally act, absolutely, upon the single report that is termed “sound” (ṣaḥīḥ); and among the Shīʿa what is now nearly settled in the science of the principles (uṣūl) is that a single report of trustworthy provenance is a proof in the ordinances of the Sacred Law, but has no validity in other than them. For the verification of the question one must refer to the science of uṣūl.

A Note

Given that the meaning of exegesis is the settled meaning of a verse, only an inquiry that has a bearing on the settled meaning of a verse can be called an exegetical inquiry; but inquiries that have no bearing on the settled meaning of a verse — such as some lexical, recitational, and rhetorical (badīʿ) inquiries — are not exegesis of the Qurʾān.

Part Three
The Revelation (Waḥy) of the Glorious Qurʾān

This part proceeds in four sections:

• A. The general belief of the Muslims concerning the revelation of the Qurʾān.
• B. The view of today’s writers concerning revelation and prophethood.
• C. What the Glorious Qurʾān says about this — (1) the speech of God; (2) Gabriel and the Trustworthy Spirit; (3) angels and satans; (4) the call of conscience; (5) concerning the second interpretation.
• D. What the Qurʾān itself says about the meaning of revelation and prophethood — (1) universal guidance and the guidance of man; (2) man’s distinction in traversing the road of life; (3) in what sense the human species is social; (4) the arising of disagreement and the need for law; (5) reason does not suffice for guiding man to law; (6) the only way for guiding man is the way of revelation; (7) an objection and its answer; (8) the way of revelation is immune from error; (9) the reality of revelation is unknown to us; (10) the manner of the revelation of the Glorious Qurʾān.

A. The General Belief of the Muslims concerning the Revelation of the Qurʾān

The Glorious Qurʾān, more than any other sacred book — such as the Torah and the Gospel — has spoken of the matter of heavenly revelation, of the sender of the revelation, and of the bearer of the revelation, and has even spoken of the manner of the revelation. The general belief of the Muslims — whose root, of course, is the very literal outward sense of the Qurʾān — concerning the revelation of the Qurʾān is that

the Glorious Qurʾān is, in its very wording, the speech of God, sent to the Noble Prophet by means of one of the archangels who are heavenly beings. The name of this angel is Gabriel (Jibrīl) and the Trustworthy Spirit (al-Rūḥ al-Amīn); he conveyed the speech of God, gradually, over twenty-three years, to the Noble Prophet (may God bless him and his household), and by it that Ḥaḍrat was charged with the mission of reciting the wording of its verses to the people, making their contents understood, and summoning [them] toward the doctrinal teachings, social regulations, civil laws, and individual duties that the Qurʾān sets forth. The name of this divine mission is “messengership” (risāla) and prophethood; and the Noble Prophet (ṣ) discharged his mission without making the least alteration or interference in the materials of the summons — without adding anything to them of his own, or subtracting, or transposing.

B. The View of Today’s Writers concerning Revelation and Prophethood

Most of today’s writers who occupy themselves with inquiry into religions and creeds hold, in explaining and construing the revelation and

prophethood of the Qurʾān, that: the Noble Prophet (ṣ) was a social genius who arose to save human society from the precipice of decline and savagery and to settle it in the cradle of civilization and freedom, and who summoned [people] toward his own pure thoughts, which he had ordered in the shape of a comprehensive and complete religion. They say that he possessed a pure soul and a lofty aspiration, and lived in a dark and murky environment in which nothing ruled but bullying, nonsense-mongering, and chaos, and in which nothing was to be seen but self-seeking, theft, plunder, and every kind of savagery. He suffered continually from beholding these grievous conditions; and at times, when the knife reached the bone, he would withdraw from the people and seclude himself for some days in a cave in the flank of one of the mountains of Tihāma, gazing at the sky and its shining stars, and at the earth, the mountain, the sea, and the desert, and all these precious means that the apparatus of creation has placed at man’s disposal; and he would grieve over all this heedlessness and ignorance that had gripped man and had turned his

precious life — which is, through and through, happiness and success — into the base life of beasts of prey and grazing cattle. The Noble Prophet (ṣ) had that perception and bore that suffering until about the age of forty, when, at forty, he succeeded in casting a plan that would save mankind from that lamentable state — whose emblem was bewilderment, unbridledness, self-seeking, and dissoluteness — and that [plan] was the religion of Islam, the most advanced regime suited to the temper of the time.

[On this view,] the Noble Prophet (ṣ) supposed his own pure thoughts to be the speech of God and divine revelation — [imagining] that God Most High had entered into converse with him by way of his pure nature; and he named his own pure and benevolent soul — from which these thoughts welled up to settle in his tranquil heart — the Trustworthy Spirit, Gabriel, and the angel of revelation; and, in general, he called the powers that in the world of nature summon toward good and every kind of happiness “angels,” and the powers that call toward evil and every kind of misery “satans” and “jinn”; and the task he had undertaken, by the requirement of the call of conscience, of rising and summoning, he named “prophethood” and “messengership.”

This construal, of course, is from those who affirm a God for the world of being and, in fairness, grant some value to the religious order of Islam; but those who do not believe in a Creator for the world reckon the apparatus of prophethood, revelation, the heavenly duties, reward and punishment, and heaven and hell to be a religious policy — in truth, of the kind of an expedient lie. They say that the prophets were reform-minded men who brought regulations for the reform of human society in the shape of a religion; and, since the people of the past ages were dark, sunk in ignorance, and worshippers of superstition, the prophets maintained the religious order under the shade of a series of superstitious beliefs about the origin (mabdaʾ) and the return (maʿād).

C. What the Glorious Qurʾān Says about This

Those who construe the apparatus of revelation and prophethood by the first statement given above are scholars who, through their engagement and familiarity with the material and natural sciences, hold everything in the world of being to be confined within the laws of nature, and suppose the ultimate root of events to be nature itself; and hence they will inevitably reckon the heavenly religions

to be social phenomena, and will measure them by the standard obtained from other social phenomena — just as, if one of the social geniuses, such as Cyrus, Darius, or Alexander, were to introduce himself as one raised up by God, his work as a heavenly mission, and his decisions as divine commands, it would admit of no construal but the one that passed in the foregoing section.

We are not now setting out to establish the metaphysical world; nor do we say to these scholars that every science can pronounce only about its own subject, and that the material sciences, which discuss the properties and effects of matter, have no right of intervention — whether in affirmation or in negation — in what lies beyond matter. What we do say is that the foregoing construal, whatever it be, must accord and be reconciled with the statements of the Glorious Qurʾān, which is the document of the Noble Prophet’s prophethood and the principal root of all these sayings; yet the plain [text of the] Qurʾān indicates the contrary of this construal. Now we measure, one by one, the parts of this construal against the Qurʾanic verses:

1. The Speech of God

According to the foregoing construal, the Noble Prophet (ṣ) named the pure thoughts that occurred to his mind “the speech of God”; and its sense is that this train of thoughts, like his other thoughts, was his own and the welling-up of his own mind, but that these particular thoughts, because they were pure and holy, were ascribed to God — so that, in the end, these thoughts have a natural relation to the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and an honorific relation to God. But the Glorious Qurʾān, explicitly and decisively, in the verses of challenge, altogether negates any relation of its own wording to the Noble Prophet (ṣ) or to any other human being. It says (10:38; 11:13): if the speech is the speech of man, let them bring a speech like it, in any field in which the Qurʾān has spoken — of doctrinal teachings, morals, ordinances, tales, wisdom, and admonition — and let them seek aid and assistance in this from wherever they wish; and when they cannot, let them know that it is the speech of God and not the speech of man; and that if jinn and men (17:88) should join hands to undertake this, they would not be able to bring the like of the Qurʾān.

It says (2:23): if you say the Qurʾān is the speech of Muḥammad, then bring the like of this Book, or a sūra of its sūras, from someone else who is, in the circumstances of his life, like him — an orphan, untutored, unschooled, who never learned to write, grown up in a dark environment like the environment of the Age of Ignorance. It says (4:82): why do they not properly contemplate the Qurʾanic verses, in which — over the twenty-three years of their descent — no change or discrepancy has appeared in the style of expression, in wording, or in meaning; whereas, had it been the speech of man and not the speech of God, it would certainly have been subject to the order of nature, and change, alteration, and discrepancy would have appeared in it?

Plainly these statements do not accord with an honorific relation, and they introduce the Qurʾān as the speech of God alone. Beyond this, the Glorious Qurʾān, in hundreds of verses, establishes miracles breaking the ordinary course — which cannot be construed by the ordinary order of nature — by which the prophets used to establish their prophethood; and if prophethood were the very call of conscience and a heavenly revelation

in the sense of pure human thoughts, the setting-up of a proof and the seeking of aid from a miracle would have no meaning. Some writers construe these explicit miracles by certain laughable interpretations; but any reader who refers to their construals will not doubt that the import of the Glorious Qurʾān is other than what these scholars say. Our aim here is not to establish the possibility of a miracle’s occurrence and the breaking of the ordinary, nor to establish the soundness of the Qurʾān’s transmission; rather, what is intended is that the Qurʾān explicitly establishes miracles for the past prophets — such as Ṣāliḥ, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus — and the tales it recounts have no vehicle but the breaking of the ordinary; and, of course, for establishing the call of conscience, the setting-up of miracles is not needed.

2. The Trustworthy Spirit and Gabriel

According to the foregoing construal, the Noble Prophet (ṣ) named his own pure soul — which never fell short in prudence and benevolence — the Trustworthy Spirit, and its casting [of thoughts] revelation; but the Glorious Qurʾān does not confirm this view, for the Qurʾān names the caster of the verses Gabriel,

and, on the said construal, there is no ground whatever for this naming. God Most High says: “Say, ‘Whoever is an enemy of Gabriel [should know that] it is he who has brought it down on your heart with the will of Allah’” (2:97) — that is, Gabriel brought down the Qurʾān by God’s permission, not without permission and of his own accord. This verse is an answer to the Jews,³³ who asked the Noble Prophet: who brings down this Qurʾān upon you? He said: Gabriel. They said: we are enemies of Gabriel, for it was he who used to bring down the restrictions upon us, the Children of Israel, and since we are his enemies we will not believe in a book he has brought. God Most High answers their saying in this verse: that Gabriel brought the Qurʾān down to the Noble Prophet by God’s permission and not of his own accord; and, in the end, the Qurʾān is the speech of God and must be believed in — not the speech of Gabriel. Plainly the Jews harboured an enmity toward a heavenly being charged with conveying the divine revelation and distinct from Ḥaḍrat Moses

and Ḥaḍrat Muḥammad (ṣ) — not toward the pure soul of Moses or of Muḥammad (ṣ). And this same Qurʾān, which in this verse ascribes the bringing-down of the Qurʾān upon the Prophet’s heart to Gabriel, in another verse ascribes it to the Trustworthy Spirit: “brought down by the Trustworthy Spirit upon your heart” (26:193–194); and from the agreement of the two verses it is known that what is meant by the Trustworthy Spirit is Gabriel. God Most High, elsewhere in His speech, describing this bringer-down of the revelation, says: “it is indeed the speech of a noble apostle, powerful and eminent with the Lord of the Throne, one who is heard and trustworthy as well. Your companion is not crazy: certainly he saw him on the manifest horizon” (81:19–23) — the verses indicate that Gabriel

is among those brought near to God, possessed of great power, of high station, a commander, one who is obeyed, and trustworthy. And elsewhere, describing these same ones brought near the Throne, who are the noble angels, He says: “Those who bear the Throne, and those around it, celebrate the praise of their Lord and have faith in Him, and they plead for forgiveness for the faithful” (40:7). The verse’s indication that the archangels brought near are independent beings possessed of understanding and will is plain; for the attributes ascribed to them — such as faith in God and pleading forgiveness for others — do not accord with anything but an independent being possessed of understanding and will. And again, concerning these same archangels brought near, He says: “The Messiah would never disdain being a servant of Allah, nor would the angels brought near [to Him] …

But those who are disdainful and arrogant, He will punish them with a painful punishment, and they will not find besides Allah any guardian or helper” (4:172–173). Plainly the Messiah and the archangels brought near, though they do not disobey, are yet threatened in this verse with the punishment of the Day of Resurrection in the case of disobedience and refusal of servanthood; and a threat with the punishment of the Day of Resurrection, which is consequent upon the omission of a kind of duty, is not correct except with an independent being, understanding, and will.

From the foregoing verses it becomes clear that the Trustworthy Spirit — also called Gabriel — who is the bearer of the revelation, is, according to the statement of the Qurʾān, a heavenly angel possessed of independent being, understanding, and will. Indeed, from the phrase that passed amid the verses of Sūrat al-Takwīr, “one who is heard [i.e. obeyed] and trustworthy” (the bringer of the Qurʾān is obeyed there),

it is gathered that Gabriel is a commander in the upper world, that a group of angels are his subordinates, and that always, or at times, the revelation of the Qurʾān reached [the Prophet] by means of his subordinates — as the verses of Sūrat ʿAbasa, too, allude to this meaning: “No indeed! These [verses of the Qurʾān] are a reminder — so let anyone who wishes remember it — in honoured scriptures, exalted and purified, in the hands of envoys, noble and pious” (80:11–16).

3. Angels and Satans

According to the foregoing construal, “angels” is a name for the natural powers that summon toward good and happiness, and “satans” a name for the natural powers that call toward evil and misery! But what is gathered from the Glorious Qurʾān is the contrary of this: the Qurʾān holds the angels and the satans to be a set of beings outside sense, possessed of independent being, understanding, and will. As for the angels, several verses passed above by which

the angels are independent beings possessed of faith and of works realized with understanding and will; and there are many other verses in the Glorious Qurʾān that testify to this same claim. As for the satans: the affair of Iblīs’s refusal to prostrate to Adam, and the exchange that passed between him and God Most High, is recounted in several places of the Glorious Qurʾān. After being driven from the court of nearness, Iblīs says that he will lead astray all the progeny of Adam save the sincere servants — “By Your might, I will surely pervert them, every one, except Your exclusive servants among them” (38:82–83); and God Most High answers that He will fill hell with him and with those of mankind who follow him, as a requital of their deeds — “I will surely fill hell with you and all of those who follow you” (38:85). Plainly the requital of a deed does not take shape except with the understanding and perception of the one requited. And likewise God Most High, elsewhere in His speech, with reference to the threat Iblīs made to man, says: “Certainly Iblis had his conjecture come true about them. So they followed him — all except a part of the faithful”

(34:20) — as we see, He has qualified Iblīs with opinion and conjecture. And likewise elsewhere He says: “When the matter is all over, Satan will say, ‘Indeed Allah made you a promise that was true and I [too] made you a promise, but I failed you. I had no authority over you, except that I called you and you responded to me. So do not blame me, but blame yourselves’” (14:22). Blame and reproach, too, are among the things that attach only to those who possess understanding and will.

The verses above, and other verses to these same purports, establish for Satan attributes and states that are bound up with the possession of independent being, understanding, and will, and that do not hold true of natural powers, which lack these attributes.

Jinn. The like of the verses that passed concerning the angels and the satans — indeed more, and clearer — exist concerning the jinn as well. God Most High, concerning the children who do not accept the summons of their father and mother, do not believe, and reckon the religion of God to be the superstitions and legends of the ancients, says: “Such are the ones against whom the word became due concerning the nations that have passed away before them of jinn and humans. They were indeed the losers” (46:18). By the requirement of this verse, the jinn too, like man, have various communities, duties, and death. And again He says elsewhere: “When We dispatched toward you a team of jinn listening to the Qurʾān; when they were in its presence, they said, ‘Be silent!’ When it was finished, they went back to their people as warners. They said, ‘O our people! Indeed we have heard a Book which has been sent down after Moses, confirming what was before it. It guides to the truth and to a straight path.

O our people! Respond to Allah’s summoner and have faith in Him. He will forgive you some of your sins and shelter you from a painful punishment.’ Those who do not respond to Allah’s summoner cannot thwart [Allah] on the earth, and they will not find any protectors besides Him. They are in manifest error” (46:29–32). The tale’s indication that the jinn, too, like man, are a group possessed of independent being, understanding, will, and duty, is plain; and there are other verses in the Glorious Qurʾān — among the verses of the Resurrection — that are no less indicative of this claim than the verses above.

4. The Call of Conscience

According to the foregoing construal, the meaning of prophethood and messengership is nothing but the being roused, and the taking up, of the call that the human conscience makes toward the general reforms; but from the Glorious Qurʾān the contrary of this meaning is understood. For God Most High says: “by the soul and Him who fashioned it, and inspired it with [discernment between] its virtues and vices” (91:7–8) — by the verse’s indication, every individual man, with his God-given conscience and nature, perceives the good and evil, the foul and fair, of his own acts, and the call to reform lies hidden within every man; save that some give ear and are saved, and some pay no heed and step toward misery, as He says afterward: “one who purifies it is felicitous, and one who betrays it fails” (91:9–10). And if prophethood and messengership were the effect of this very call of conscience, which is universal, then all individuals would possess prophethood and messengership — whereas God Most High assigns this

office to certain individuals [only], as He says: “And when a sign comes to them, they say, ‘We will not believe until we are given the like of what was given to Allah’s apostles.’ Allah knows best where to place His apostleship!” (6:124). The verse indicates that the unbelievers made it a condition of their faith that the apostleship should become general and that they too should have a share of it; but God Most High gives them a refusing answer and affirms the exclusiveness of the apostleship.

5. Concerning the Second Construal

As we noted under the first construal, we are not now setting out to establish the truth of the Islamic summons and the veracity of the Noble Prophet’s claim; rather, we wish to say that the second construal, too, does not accord with the Qurʾanic statements. For, according to the second construal, the doctrinal principles that the prophets instilled in people are a train of superstitious beliefs, imposed upon the people of that time — who were void of

knowledge and culture — by way of religious policy; out of benevolence, of course, so that the people — through fear of a God who punishes severely the transgression of the religious laws, through fear of a Day of Resurrection on which the requital is given, and likewise through desire for a paradise promised to the obedient and deferred to the Day of Resurrection — might follow the religious laws.

The history of the lives of the other prophets is not very clear; but the history of the life of the Noble Prophet (may God bless him and his household) is very clear, and anyone who refers scrupulously to the history of that Ḥaḍrat’s life and conduct will not have the least doubt that he had, in his summons, a hundred-per-cent faith and complete reliance and assurance. In that case, had the story of the religious beliefs been a superstitious tale, all these proofs and evidences that are set up in the Noble Qurʾān for the Islamic beliefs — and the arguments made to establish the Maker of the world, His oneness and His other attributes, and the other beliefs regarding prophethood and the Return — would never have had any meaning.

D. What the Qurʾān Itself Says about the Meaning of Revelation and Prophethood

What is gathered from the Glorious Qurʾān is that this heavenly book was obtained by way of a revelation (waḥy) that came to the Noble Prophet (ṣ); and revelation is a kind of heavenly (non-material) speaking that is not perceived by way of sense or of rational reflection, but is [received] with another perception and awareness that arises, at times, in certain individuals — by the divine will — and that receives the unseen instructions (that is, [instructions] hidden from sense and reason) from the divine revelation and teaching. The undertaking of this affair, too, is called prophethood. To make this matter clear, we are obliged to note and set out the following premises:

1. All Beings Have a Goal and End in Their Existence

In the early part of this book, in the course of a detailed discussion, it was noted that the various kinds seen in this world — each of them, animate and inanimate alike — has a goal and end in its existence, toward which it is turned and moving from the start of its coming-to-be, and, in proportion to the goal it has, is equipped in its existential structure with powers and instruments that are the source of that kind’s special activities — activities that

bring it near its goal and, in the end, make it victorious — as God Most High says: “Our Lord is He who gave everything its creation and then guided it” (20:50); and again He says: “who created and proportioned, who determined and guided” (87:2–3). It was also noted that the human kind is not excepted from this generality — the law of universal guidance — and has, in its life, a goal toward which it is turned, and is equipped with an apparatus suited to it; its success being the attaining of its goal (its perfection and felicity), and its failure and despair of attaining it being its defect, wretchedness, and misery; and by the guidance of creation it is guided toward its goal and end. God Most High says, concerning the guidance of man in particular: “Indeed We created man from the drop of a mixed fluid so that We may test him. So We made him endowed with hearing and sight. Indeed We have guided him to the way, be he grateful or ungrateful” (76:2–3).

And again He says: “He has created him from a drop of [seminal] fluid, and then proportioned him. Then He made the way easy for him” (80:19–20).

2. Man’s Distinction in Traversing the Road of Life

The distinction that the class of animate beings has over the inanimate is that the activity of animate beings is a knowing activity, and they perform their acts by way of perception and awareness; and man, while sharing with the other animals in knowing activity, has a distinction over the rest — namely, that man is equipped with reason and intellect. That is, in acts for which activity is possible for him, he does not, by the mere possibility of activity, set about the deed; rather, he weighs the good and evil, the benefit and harm, of the act: if its benefit prevails, he undertakes it, and if its harm is greater

he refrains; and in every act he performs, he follows, according to the discernment he has made, the ruling of his own reason. And reason, where it sees an unopposed benefit, will rule the deed necessary, and where it sees a pure harm, or a harm that outweighs [the benefit], will rule its omission necessary. (Of course, what we mean by the ruling and judgment of reason is that it perceives the necessity of the deed or of its omission; but the summoning toward the deed or the omission, and the wanting of one of the two, is in truth the work of emotion and feeling, upon whose wanting reason performs that perceiving — and confirms or denies the unopposed benefit of the deed. Yes, since these perceptions are conventional and posited, the perception, the judgment, and the ruling in them are one; let sufficient care be taken.)

3. In What Sense Is the Human Species Social?

That the human species is, externally, social — that it has ever lived and lives in a state of association and grouping, individuals joining hands to meet their needs by cooperation — there is no doubt; but does it want this cooperation and joining of hands by the requirement of its primary nature, and is it, from the first, inclined

to perform its activities mingled with others, and to take for itself, from the total product of the work, a share in proportion to the social weight it has? What we find is that the individual nature of man has needs and wants, and has also emotions and feelings, which set its powers and instruments to work with their various demands; and at this stage it is unaware of the needs and wants of others.

Man, to meet his own needs, makes use of everything: on the road to attaining his aims he takes help from the simple and compound bodies of the earth; he brings the kinds of plants and trees — from leaf and fruit to stalk and root — and the kinds of animals and their products to the meeting of his own needs, pressing them all into service, profiting from the benefits of their existence, and completing his own deficiencies by what he has obtained. Now will man — whose state is this, who presses into service whatever he finds on the road of his own benefits and profits from the results of its existence — when he reaches his own kind, show respect and take up another course, and, out of purity, stretch out the hand of cooperation toward them, and, on the road of their benefits, close his eyes to a part of his own benefits?

No, never. Rather man, on the one hand, senses his own countless needs — which he will never, by himself, be able to fulfil, all of them — and perceives the possibility of meeting a part of those needs by the hands of his own kind; and, on the other hand, observes that the power he has, and the hopes and wants hidden within him, others too — who are, like him, human — have; and that, just as he defends his own benefits and does not close his eyes to them, so others too are in the same state. It is here that, of necessity, he yields to social cooperation, and gives a part of the benefits of his work to meet the needs of others, and in return receives, from the benefits of others’ work, the amount he needs to meet his own — in truth entering a general market of give-and-take that is ever standing, in which every kind of the requisites of life is put up for sale. Consequently the product of the community’s work is pooled, and each of the individuals, in proportion to his social weight — that is, to the measure of the worth of the work he gives to the community — takes a share of the said product,

and with the share he takes meets the needs of his own life. From the foregoing statement it becomes clear that the requirement of man’s primary nature — which wants its own benefits — is that it should press others into service on the road of its own benefits and profit from the fruit of their work, and that it is only by way of necessity and compulsion that it yields to cooperative association. This matter is very clear from studying the state of children; for a child asks whatever its heart wants, without question and beyond measure, and stresses its demand with weeping; and little by little, as with rising age it draws nearer to the arena of society and grows more acquainted with conditions, it gradually closes its eyes to its extravagant demands, until, fully entered into society, it in a manner forgets extravagant asking. Another witness to the matter is that we ordinarily see that whenever man obtains a power above the power of others, he fearlessly spurns cooperative association and its requisites and sets to pressing individuals into service, appropriating the benefits of their work to himself without recompense. God Most High, alluding to this cooperative association, says: “It is We who have dispensed among them their livelihood in the present life, and raised some of them

above others in rank, so that some may take others into service” (43:32). The noble verse alludes to the reality of man’s cooperative association, in which each of the individuals excels others in a part of the means of life, so that individuals differ in various degrees, and each, in what he excels, presses others into his service and turns their acts to his own benefit — with the result that individuals are woven together like the warp and weft of a garment and form a single social unit. And again He says: “Indeed man is most unfair and ungrateful!” (14:34); “Indeed he is most unfair and senseless” (33:72). The noble verse alludes to the natural instinct of pressing-into-service, by which man transgresses the bounds of others and lays his hand upon their benefits.

4. The Arising of Disagreement and the Need for Law

Although man, of necessity, in the situation of encountering his own kind, has accepted cooperative association — and thereby has in truth sacrificed a part of his own freedom of action to preserve another part — yet the mere founding of a cooperative association, given the lack of balance and the gross disparity that exist, when weighed, in the psychic and bodily powers of individuals, cures no ill; and through the collision of individuals’ benefits, this very association, which had come into being for reform and the removal of disagreement, becomes the first cause of the appearance of corruption and disagreement. It is here that the necessity of a set of common regulations — acknowledged and respected among the associated — is fully felt; for plainly, even in a trifling transaction of give-and-take, if there be no common regulations acknowledged and respected between seller and buyer, the transaction does not take place. There must, then, come into being among individuals laws by whose currency the association is kept from disintegration and the individuals’ benefits from ruin; and the apparatus of creation, in whose program is the guidance

of the kinds toward their goal and felicity, must guide man too toward a law that guarantees the felicity of society. God Most High says: “He has created him from a drop of [seminal] fluid, and then proportioned him. Then He made the way easy for him” (80:19–20) — and the making-easy of the road of life for man, for whom social life is decreed, is that laws and regulations be placed within his reach.

5. In Guiding Man to Law, Reason Does Not Suffice

This guidance — by whatever means, and toward whatever [end] — will be the work of the apparatus of creation; for it is that same apparatus that created man, set a goal of felicity for him, and made the universal guidance (of which the guidance of man too is a part) a part of its own program. And it is plain that in the work of creation contradiction and error have no meaning; and if now and then a cause falls short of its goal or swerves, the fault is not that cause’s own, but is traced to the effect of another cause or

causes that neutralize or divert the effect of that cause; and had there been no mutual interference of causes, no cause would ever do two contradictory and opposed works, nor accept error and swerving in its own work. And from this it is clear that guidance toward a law that removes disagreement is not the work of reason; for it is this same reason that summons toward disagreement — this same reason that brings into being in man the instinct of pressing-into-service and of preserving benefits absolutely and with complete freedom of action, and that accepts a balanced association, in view of the existence of an opposer, only by way of necessity and compulsion; and plainly, in creation a single acting power does not produce from itself two contradictory effects — the casting of disagreement and the removal of disagreement. All these countless transgressions and breaches of the current laws that happen daily and are reckoned sins issue from those who possess reason — otherwise they would not be reckoned sins; and if reason guided to the laws that remove disagreement, and by its instinct had no dealings with transgression, it would not consent to the said transgressions and would prevent them.

The real factor in these transgressions, despite the presence of reason, is that reason’s ruling — that a balanced association be accepted and the laws comprising social justice be observed — was by way of necessity and of regard for an opposer, which prevented complete freedom of action; and where there is no opposer, [reason] had no ruling to observe cooperation and social justice. The transgressors of the law are either persons who, having a power above the power of the law’s executive force, transgress fearlessly; or persons who are outside the reach of the law’s executors — through distance, or the strength of their place, or the heedlessness of those charged with affairs; or who have contrived excuses for themselves to make their own transgression appear lawful; or who profit from the helplessness and defenselessness of those wronged. In every case there is no opposer before them, or, if there be, it is weak and ineffective; and plainly reason, in this case, has no ruling, does not check absolute freedom, and leaves the instinct of pressing-into-service to its own devices. So reason cannot guide toward a social law that secures and guarantees the benefits of society while, therein, preserving the benefits of the individual justly; for only in the case

that there be an opposer does it rule the observance of the law in a balanced association; but where it sees before it no opposer to prevent absolute freedom, it has no ruling, or rules the contrary. God Most High says: “Indeed man becomes rebellious when he considers himself without need” (96:6–7); and among [the forms of] considering-oneself-without-need is the very considering-oneself-without-need of clinging to cooperation and law for the preservation of benefits.

6. The Only Way for Guiding Man Is the Way of Revelation

From the foregoing discussions it was obtained that man, like the other kinds of creation, has in his life a goal of felicity; and since, from the standpoint of the character of his existential structure and of his natural needs, he has no escape from social life, his felicity and misery lie in the felicity and misery of society, and in every case he must be part of a single social unit and seek the felicity and the good end of his own individual nature in the felicity of society.

And it became known that it is the common law alone that directly guarantees the felicity of society and, incidentally, the felicity of the individual, justly. And it became known that man too, like the other kinds, must be guided by way of creation toward his kind-felicity and toward whatever lies in the introduction to that felicity; and man’s felicity lay in the felicity of his social life; so he had to be guided, by way of creation, toward the said common law. And it became known that human reason is not sufficient for guidance toward the law, since it does not, in all states, rule the observance of general cooperation and social justice.

From the above premises it must be concluded that there must exist, in the human kind, another [kind of] perception besides rational perception, by which the said guidance of creation is accomplished; and the way that, with these characteristics, we know of in the human kind other than the way of reason is the way of a perception of which certain individuals of mankind — under the name of the prophets and messengers of God — have spoken, which they have named heavenly revelation, and for whose claim and summons they have truly set up a proof.

God Most High says: “Mankind were a single community; then Allah sent the prophets as bearers of good news and as warners, and He sent down with them the Book with the truth, that it may judge between the people concerning that about which they differed” (2:213). And again He says: “We have indeed revealed to you as We revealed to Noah and the prophets after him … apostles, as bearers of good news and warners, so that mankind may not have any argument against Allah, after the [sending of the] apostles” (4:163–165). As is plain, the first verse discerns the way of revelation and prophethood to be the only way of removing people’s disagreements, and the second

verse introduces revelation and prophethood as the sole proof for the completing of the argument [against mankind]; and its entailment is that reason is not sufficient for showing the way and completing the argument — that is, had the prophets not been sent, and the divine ordinances not conveyed, and had people done wrong and worked corruption, they would not, merely by possessing reason and understanding the ugliness of wrong and corruption, be liable to punishment before God.

7. An Objection and Its Answer

Objection: On the excuse that reason cannot check the breaking of laws and people’s transgressions, you have taken the duty of legislation — or, in the book’s expression, the guidance of man toward kind-felicity — out of the hand of reason and given it into the hand of revelation and prophethood; whereas the laws and regulations of revelation, too, cannot get anything done or check transgressions — indeed, transgression of the regulations of the sacred laws and religions is greater, and people’s acceptance of these regulations less.

Answer: Showing the way is one matter, and people’s practical following of that guidance is another; and what, by the requirement of the law of universal guidance, lies upon creation is

that it should guide the human kind, by some means among the means, toward a law that guarantees its felicity — not that it should practically close the way of transgression and compel people to follow. And our taking the case of legal transgressions where there is no opposer or hinderer of freedom of action as evidence of reason’s insufficiency was not because reason does not prevent the deed, but because reason, in these cases, had no ruling and did not summon to social cooperation and the following of law — for its summons was founded on necessity, it saw before it an opposer preventing freedom of action, and it discerned the harm of that freedom to be greater than its benefit. Plainly such a ruler, where there is no opposer in the matter and no hinderer of freedom of action, will not forbid a transgression in which there is freedom of action, nor command the following of a law that is contrary to freedom. So reason, since it does not in all cases rule the following of law, cannot be a sufficient means for the continual guidance of man; but the way of revelation rules the following of law without exception, universally and perpetually, and entrusts the ruling to the hand of a God who,

with His infinite power and knowledge, is in every case watchful over man, and — without practising any discrimination — will requite a good deed with good and a bad deed with bad. God Most High says: “Sovereignty belongs only to Allah” (12:40); and He says: “So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it” (99:7–8); and He says: “Allah will indeed judge between them on the Day of Resurrection. Indeed Allah is witness to all things” (22:17); and He says: “Do they not know that Allah knows whatever they hide and whatever they disclose?” (2:77); and He says: “And Allah is watchful over all things” (33:52).

And from this it becomes clear that the heavenly religion, which has come by way of revelation, is more powerful in preventing transgression and violation than the ordinary human laws. For the utmost means of the human laws in preventing transgression and violation is to set watchers and law-enforcement officers over the outward acts of people, and to appoint for transgressors and violators of the law a punishment that will be carried out only in the case of the law’s power and the appearing of the crime — and no more. But the heavenly religion, first, like the human laws and ordinary regimes, has particular watchers over the outward acts of people; second, by way of laying down the duty of bidding the right and forbidding the wrong, has set all people, without exception, as watchers over one another’s acts and guardians of the law; third, it is part of the religious beliefs that people’s acts, good and bad, are recorded, preserved, and filed for the Day of Reckoning; and fourth, above all these, the God of the world and of the world’s people encompasses man and his act, and is, in every state and in every place, present and watching. And as for the requital of acts, in addition to the this-worldly punishment which, like the human laws, is fixed for each crime, the punishment of the Day of Reckoning

— which never admits discrimination or exception — is part of the religious beliefs. God Most High says: “Obey Allah and obey the Apostle and those vested with authority among you” (4:59); and He says: “But the faithful, men and women, are comrades of one another: they bid what is right and forbid what is wrong” (9:71); and He says: “Indeed, there are over you watchers, noble writers who know whatever you do” (82:10–12); and He says: “and your Lord is watchful over all things” (34:21).

A further objection: According to what has passed, reason does not in all states rule the observance of law and the necessity of avoiding transgression; and this meaning conflicts with what has come in a number of the ḥadīths of the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt

— that God Most High has two proofs (ḥujja) over His servants: an outward proof, which is the Prophet, and an inward proof, which is the reason of man — for, according to what has passed, reason has no ruling in all, or in most, cases of transgression, so as to hold the office of a proof.

Answer: The unexceptionable work of man’s practical reason is the summons to draw benefit and to avoid harm. Now, in the case that the accepting of cooperation and joint effort by self-serving, service-seeking man (with the explanation that passed) be by way of necessity, and the source of the necessity be the power of those from whose acts man wishes to profit freely, or the power of those in whose hand the penal regulations lie — then, of course, on this supposition, if in some cases there be no compeller present, reason too will not rule the necessity of following the law, and will not forbid its transgression and violation. But if the source of the necessity (as the theory of revelation requires) be the ruling of God, the watching of acts, the requital of transgression, and the non-discriminating, unexceptionable [character] of good deeds and bad — [entrusted] to a God to whose pure court heedlessness, ignorance, and incapacity have no way — then, on this supposition, reason will find no case in which it sees the necessity removed and turns away from

ruling; and it will forever rule what revelation rules. God Most High says: “Is He who sustains every soul in spite of what it earns …?” (13:33); and He says: “there is a guard over every soul” (86:4); and He says: “Every soul is hostage to what it has earned” (74:38).

8. The Way of Revelation Is Immune from Error

According to what has passed, the way of revelation, and of the teaching of the program of man’s social life by this way, is part of the program of creation; and it became clear that creation and the bringing-into-being never err in their work. So the materials of the heavenly religion, which are taught to people by way of revelation, will, along the whole of this distance, be afflicted by no error or mistake whatever. God Most High says: “Knower of the Unseen, He does not disclose His Unseen to anyone, except to an apostle He approves of. Then He dispatches a sentinel before and behind him,

so that He may ascertain that they have communicated the messages of their Lord, and He comprehends all that is with them, and He keeps count of all things” (72:26–28). And it is from this that the prophets and messengers of God must be inerrant (maʿṣūm): that is, both in receiving the teachings of revelation from the upper world, and in preserving what they have received, and in conveying what they have received and preserved, they must be immune from error and disobedience. For these [prophets] are the means of the apparatus of creation in the universal guidance it makes; and if, in receiving, preserving, or conveying the revelation, they were to make an error, or, through satanic and carnal whisperings, commit a betrayal, or commit a disobedience — which would necessarily be a practical conveying contrary to what they have verbally conveyed — then, in all these cases, the apparatus of creation would have erred in the carrying-out of its program of guidance, and an impossibility would have come to pass.

God Most High says: “With Allah rests guidance to the straight path, and some of them are devious” (16:9).

9. The Reality of Revelation Is Unknown to Us

What became clear from our foregoing discussions was that the program of man’s life — which is the introduction to the attaining of his kind-felicity, and the teaching of which lies upon creation — cannot possibly reach him by way of reason; rather, there must exist another way of perception, other than the way of reflection, by which man receives the duties of his kind-life; and this way we name the way of revelation. Of course, the requirement of the proof is only this much: that in the human kind such a perception must exist — not that it should be universal; rather, since the receiving of revelation requires a pure perception, immune from every kind of filth and pollution, and the individuals of mankind differ greatly in soundness of state, in moderation of perception, and in purity of soul (and in the contrary of these attributes), it must be said that this gift is realized, rarely, only in certain

individuals — as the Qurʾān mentions a company under the name of the prophets and messengers of God, but refrains from stating their number and the names of them all, naming, of their group, only some twenty-odd persons.³⁴ As for us, who are without a share of this gift — or, in other words, have not tasted it — its reality is unknown to us; we have only seen and heard some of its effects (among them the Glorious Qurʾān) and some of its attributes, which have reached us by way of prophethood;

yet, with all this, one cannot say that its attributes are only what has reached us, and no more; it is possible that it has other attributes, properties, and branches that have not been set out for us.

10. The Manner of the Revelation of the Glorious Qurʾān

In brief, what the Glorious Qurʾān explains concerning the manner of its own revelation is that the revelation of this heavenly book was by way of speaking, God Most High having spoken with His noble Prophet, and that Ḥaḍrat having received the speech of God with his whole being (not with his ear alone). God Most High says: “It is not [possible] for any human that Allah should speak to him except through revelation or from behind a curtain, or send a messenger who reveals by His permission whatever He wishes. Indeed He is all-exalted, all-wise. Thus have We revealed to you the Spirit of Our dispensation. You did not know what the Book is, nor what is faith; but We made it a light that We may guide by its means whomever We wish of Our servants. And indeed you guide to a straight path” (42:51–52).

By the indication of the doubt (tardīd) in the first verse — and [the fact] that the first [kind of] revelation is ascribed to no place, while the third kind is ascribed to a messenger — three different kinds are mentioned in the verse for God’s speaking:

1. A divine speaking in which there is no intermediary whatever between God and man.

2. A divine speaking that is heard from behind a veil — like the tree of [Mount] Ṭūr, from which Moses (ʿa) heard the speech of God, [heard] from its direction.

3. A divine speaking that an angel bears and conveys to man; and in this case the speech of the angel of revelation is heard, relating the speech of God.

And the second verse conveys that the Glorious Qurʾān reached the Noble Prophet (ṣ) by this same way; and from this it becomes clear that the revelation of the Qurʾān was by way of speaking and converse. And again He says: “brought down by the Trustworthy Spirit upon your heart (so that you may be one of the warners), in a clear Arabic language” (26:193–195); and He says: “Whoever is an enemy of Gabriel [should know that] it is he who has brought it down on your heart” (2:97). From these verses it is gathered that the Qurʾān, or a part of the Qurʾān, was sent by means of the angel of revelation — who is Gabriel and the Trustworthy Spirit (the third kind of speaking) — and that the Noble Prophet (ṣ) received the Qurʾān from the angel of revelation with his self³⁵ — that is, with his whole being — not by way of the ear.

And He says: “whereat He revealed to His servant whatever He revealed. The heart did not deny what it saw. Will you then dispute with him about what he saw?!” (53:10–12); and elsewhere He has expressed the receiving of revelation as the reading of tablets [scriptures]: “an apostle from Allah reciting impeccable scriptures” (98:2).

In conclusion of this discussion we say that many other explanations and questions concerning the kinds of revelation, and its attributes and properties, are to be gathered from the Glorious Qurʾān; but this book, with the brevity envisaged for it, has no room to bring them forward.

Part Four
The Relation of the Glorious Qurʾān to the Sciences

This part proceeds in four sections: A. the Qurʾān’s exaltation of knowledge and its encouragement to acquire it; B. the sciences the Qurʾān invites [us] to learn; C. the sciences proper to the Qurʾān; D. the sciences in whose emergence the Qurʾān was a factor.

A. The Qurʾān’s Exaltation of Knowledge and Its Encouragement to Acquire It

The exaltation and extolling that the Glorious Qurʾān has made of knowledge and learning — the like of it is not found in any other heavenly book; and on this head it is enough that the Qurʾān named the time of the Arabs’ savagery, which was the age before Islam, “the Age of Ignorance” (Jāhiliyya).

The Glorious Qurʾān, in hundreds of verses and by various ways, brings up the name of knowledge and learning, and in most of them is in the posture of magnifying it. God Most High, in the posture of reminding man of His favour, says: “taught man what he did not know” (96:5). And again He says: “Allah will raise those of you who have faith and those who have been given knowledge in rank” (58:11). And finally He says: “Are those who know equal to those who do not know?” (39:9). The Qurʾanic verses on this head are many; and in the ḥadīth of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) — which is next to the Book of God — countless reports have come on this subject.

B. The Sciences the Qurʾān Invites [Us] to Learn

The Glorious Qurʾān, in many verses (which, on account of their abundance and multitude, we have not undertaken to quote), invites [people] to reflect on the signs of the sky and the shining stars, on the wondrous variations that appear in their conditions, and on the firm order that rules over them. It urges and encourages reflection on the creation of the earth, the seas, the mountains, and the deserts, on the wonders lodged in the belly of the earth, on the alternation of night and day, and on the changes of the seasons. It encourages reflection on the wondrous creation of the plant and the order that runs in its life, and on the various creation of the animal and the effects and states it displays in the environment of existence. And it insists fully on reflection on the creation of man himself, on the secrets and mysteries lodged in the structure of his existence, and — higher than that — on the soul (nafs) and its inner worlds and the connections it has with the highest realm (the malakūt al-aʿlā); and on travelling through the regions of the earth and observing the remains of the ancients, and on investigating the conditions and states of the nations and human societies, and their tales and histories.

And in this way it invites [people] to learn the natural, mathematical, and philosophical sciences, and the literary arts — in short, all the sciences that lie within the reach of human thought, whose learning is to the benefit of the human world and brings felicity to human society. Yes, the Glorious Qurʾān invites [people] to these sciences on the condition that they be taken as a guide to the truth and reality, and that they comprise the true worldview whose heading is the knowledge of God; otherwise, a science that occupies man with itself and holds him back from knowing the truth and reality is, in the lexicon of the Glorious Qurʾān, synonymous with ignorance. God Most High says: “They know just an outward aspect of the life of the world, but they are oblivious of the Hereafter” (30:7). And He says: “Have you seen him who has taken his desire to be his god and whom Allah has led astray knowingly, and set a seal upon his hearing and his heart, and put a blindfold on his sight? So who will guide him after Allah?” (45:23).

The Noble Qurʾān, with the encouragements it has made to the learning of the various sciences, has itself undertaken the teaching of a complete course of the divine teachings and of the generalities of Islamic morals and jurisprudence.

C. The Sciences Proper to the Qurʾān

Among the Muslims there are also sciences whose subject of inquiry is the Glorious Qurʾān itself; the history of the emergence of these sciences is the first days of the descent, and gradually their questions ripened and were refined among the people until they reached the degree of perfection, and at last the investigators of these disciplines made compositions in them and wrote countless books. Some of these sciences inquire into the words of the Noble Qurʾān, and some into its meanings.

The sciences that inquire into the words of the Qurʾān are the arts of tajwīd and recitation — an art that inquires into the manner of pronouncing the letters of the alphabet and the states and accidents that the letters acquire, in the Arabic language, among simple and compound words, such as assimilation (idghām) and the substitution of letters, and the rules

of pausing (waqf) and beginning (ibtidāʾ), and their like. And an art that undertakes the fixing and grounding of the seven famous recitations, the three other recitations, the recitations of the Companions, and the anomalous (shādhdh) recitations. And an art that enumerates the number of the sūras, verses, words, and letters, and reckons the verses, words, and letters of the whole Qurʾān. And an art that speaks of the particular orthography (rasm) of the Glorious Qurʾān and the differences it has from the ordinary Arabic script.

And the sciences that inquire into the meanings of the Glorious Qurʾān: there is an art that investigates the generalities of the meanings of the verses — such as tanzīl and taʾwīl, the outer and the inner, the definitive and the metaphorical, and the abrogating and the abrogated of the Qurʾān. There is an art that inquires into the verses of the ordinances (āyāt al-aḥkām), and is in truth a branch of Islamic jurisprudence. And there is an art that speaks of the meanings of the particular Qurʾanic verses, called the exegesis (tafsīr) of the Qurʾān — and in the second part of this book some discussions passed concerning exegesis and the classes of the commentators. The scholars and investigators of Islam have made countless compositions in each of the sciences special to the Qurʾān.

D. The Sciences in Whose Emergence the Qurʾān Was a Factor

There is no doubt that the religious sciences current today among the Muslims, and taught and learned [among them], have their history of founding and currency bounded by the mission of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the descent of the Qurʾān, which brought with it the divine teachings and the laws of the Sacred Law. In the first century of the Hijra these sciences — on account of the ban that the seat of the caliphate had placed on the writing and compiling of ḥadīth and the like³⁶ — were current in an unarranged manner among the Companions and Successors; and, except for a very small number who wrote brief works in jurisprudence, exegesis, and ḥadīth, the majority of people took to learning by way of memorization and transmitted [it] from breast to breast. From the beginning of the second century, on account of the lifting of the ban, people first took to writing ḥadīth, and after that to writing the inquiries pertaining to the other sciences, and to casting composition and compilation into moulds; and they arranged and ordered the sciences.

And in this way the discipline of ḥadīth, the science of the men [of ḥadīth] (rijāl), [the science of] dirāya, the discipline of the principles of jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh), the science of jurisprudence (fiqh), and the science of theology (kalām) came into being. And even philosophy — although at first it entered the Islamic environment as a transmission from Greek into Arabic, and for a time was in people’s hands roughly in its Greek form — after a while became subject to the manner of thinking of the [Islamic] environment and, both in matter and in form, underwent changes and was transformed; the witness to this being that in the philosophy current today among the Muslims one does not come upon a single question in the divine teachings whose text, and the proofs and evidences used to establish it, cannot be found in the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth and drawn out from among them.

This same thing can be raised concerning the Arabic literary sciences too; for the likes of morphology (ṣarf), syntax (naḥw), semantics (maʿānī), the science of figures (bayān), rhetoric (badīʿ), lexicography, the discipline of philology (fiqh al-lugha), and derivation (ishtiqāq) — although their subject of inquiry is Arabic speech absolutely — yet, without doubt, what impelled people to the tracing, fixing, and refining of the principles and rules of these sciences was that same divine masterpiece which had drawn people, captivated, to its sweet and eloquent expression and its beautiful style; and people, for the clarifying of the

structure of the words, the composition of the sentences, the meanings of the expressions, the eloquence and clarity of the statements, and its subtle verbal artistries, came to need to obtain the universal rules of these [matters] — with the parallels and likenesses they had in the Arabic language — and, by their help, to draw results from their own investigation; and in this way the sciences of morphology, syntax, lexicon, and the three arts of rhetoric were refined and arranged.

It is related that Ibn ʿAbbās, who was among the Companion-exegetes, used to state the meanings of the verses by way of citing Arab poetry as evidence, and used to recommend the gathering and memorizing of Arab poetry, saying: “Poetry is the register (dīwān) of the Arabs.” And with such [attentions], the prose and poetry of the Arabs were fixed, until it reached the point that the well-known Shīʿī scholar al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad al-Baṣrī wrote, in lexicography, the Kitāb al-ʿAyn, and laid down the science of prosody (ʿarūḍ) for the knowing of the metres of the poems; and others too made compositions in these two disciplines. And the discipline of history, too, in Islam branched off from the discipline of ḥadīth: it began at first with the tales of the prophets and the nations, and with the biography (sīra) of the Noble Prophet (ṣ); and after that the history of the first age of Islam was added to it, and then it took the form of a history of the world, historians such as al-Ṭabarī, al-Masʿūdī, al-Yaʿqūbī, and al-Wāqidī writing books.

And one may say, with boldness, that the real factor in the Muslims’ occupation with the rational sciences — the natural sciences, mathematics, and the rest — in the form of transmission and translation at the beginning of the affair, and in the manner of independence and innovation at its end, was that same cultural impulse which the Glorious Qurʾān had prepared in the souls of the Muslims. At the beginning of the affair, at the hands of the seat of the caliphate — which in those days was established among the Arab nation — the various rational sciences were translated from Greek, Syriac, and Indian into Arabic, and after that were placed within the reach of all the Muslims of the world, who were of various nations, and day by day increased in the breadth of their researches, the precision of their contents, and the goodness of their arrangement. And it is plain that the vast Islamic civilization — which, a little after the Hijra and the [Prophet’s] passing, took the greater part of the inhabited world under its sway and ruled therein, and which today keeps some six hundred million of the earth’s population under the name of Islam — was one of the manifest effects of the Glorious Qurʾān. (Although we, as Shīʿa, have objections against the caliphs and the other kings who were the workmen of this civilization, on account of the laxities they committed in clarifying the truths of religion and in carrying out its

laws — yet, at the same time, whatever of Islam has shone upon the world is, without doubt, from the Qurʾān.) And it is plain that such a transformation — which is one of the manifest links in the chain of the world’s events — will have a considerable effect on the subsequent links; and hence the Glorious Qurʾān will be one of the causes and preludes of today’s transformation and of the extension and advancement of the world’s culture. Of course, for this matter to become clearer and to show its real worth, more analysis is needed; but the manner of brevity observed in this book prevents [our] occupying [ourselves] with it.

Part Five
The Order of the Qurʾān’s Descent and Its Diffusion among the People

This part proceeds in the following sections:

• A. In what order were the verses of the Qurʾān revealed?
• B. In pursuit of the foregoing discussion.
• C. The occasions of revelation.
• D. The method to be followed regarding the occasions of revelation.
• E. The order of the descent of the sūras.
• F. A look at [that] report, and other reports.
• G. The gathering of the Qurʾān into one codex (the Qurʾān before the passing).
• H. After the passing.
• I. The Muslims’ concern for the affair of the Qurʾān.
• J. The Qurʾān is preserved from every kind of alteration (taḥrīf).
• K. The recitation of the Qurʾān, and its memorization and transmission.
• L. The classes of the reciters.
• M. The seven reciters.
• N. The number of the Qurʾanic verses.
• O. The names of the sūras.
• P. The script and vowelling of the Qurʾān.

A. In What Order Were the Verses of the Qurʾān Revealed?

The sūras and verses of the Glorious Qurʾān were not sent down all at once. This matter — besides the definite history that testifies to the gradual descent of the Glorious Qurʾān over the twenty-three years of the Noble Prophet’s summons — is clear from the contents of the verses themselves. God Most High says: “We have sent the Qurʾān in [discrete] parts so that you may read it to the people a little at a time, and We have sent it down piecemeal” (17:106).

In the Glorious Qurʾān there is the abrogating and the abrogated, and there are verses that have a complete connection with tales and events that are never gathered in one time, so that the verses relating to them should be sent down all at once to discuss them. And likewise the sūras and verses of the Qurʾān were not sent down in the order in which they are placed in the noble codex — in the sense that Sūrat al-Ḥamd was first, then the sūras of al-Baqara, Āl ʿImrān, al-Nisāʾ, and al-Māʾida, and so on in this order, and likewise the verses in the recorded order. For, on this head too, besides the testimony of definite history, the contents of the verses themselves show that some sūras and verses of the Qurʾān — with contents suited to the early time of the mission, such as Sūrat al-ʿAlaq and [Sūrat] Nūn — are recorded near the end of the Glorious Qurʾān; and that many sūras and verses whose contents accord with the period after the Hijra and the latter part of the age of the noble Messenger (ṣ) — such as the sūras of al-Baqara, Āl ʿImrān, al-Nisāʾ, al-Anfāl, and al-Tawba — are placed at the beginning of the Qurʾān. And it is plain that, by the requirement of these various contents, the sūras and verses of the Qurʾān have, from the standpoint of descent, a complete connection with the events and happenings

and the various needs that were realized and came to pass during the period of the Noble Prophet’s summons. For example, the sūras and verses that comprise only the summons of the polytheists and the struggle against idol-worship suit the days before the Hijra, when the Prophet (ṣ) was in Mecca, occupied with summoning the idol-worshippers; and the verses of fighting (qitāl) and the verses of the ordinances were sent down following the events and needs that appeared after the Hijra, the forming of the Islamic community in the city of Yathrib (Medina), and the ever-increasing advance of Islam.

B. In Pursuit of the Foregoing Discussion

According to what has passed, the sūras and verses of the Qurʾān, by the differences in the place of descent, the time of descent, and the causes and conditions that provided the ground of descent, acquire [several] divisions:

1. Some of the sūras and verses are Meccan and some Medinan; and ordinarily whatever of the Qurʾān was sent down before the Hijra of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) is counted Meccan — and most of the Qurʾanic sūras, especially the short sūras, are of this kind — and whatever was sent down after the Hijra is called Medinan, even if it was sent down outside

Medina, or even in Mecca. 2. Some of the sūras and verses were sent down on a journey, and some at home. And likewise the sūras and verses are divided into what was sent down by night or by day; into what was sent down in peace or in war; into what was sent down on earth or in heaven; and into what was sent down in privacy or among the people — and we shall discuss the benefit of knowing these divisions in the section on the occasions of revelation. 3. Some of the sūras were sent down more than once — as it is said that Sūrat al-Ḥamd was sent down twice, once in Mecca and once in Medina; and likewise some verses were sent down repeatedly — as the verse “So which of your Lord’s bounties will you both deny?” is repeated some thirty times in Sūrat al-Raḥmān, and as the two verses “There is indeed a sign in that; but most of them do not have faith” / “Indeed your Lord is the All-mighty, the All-merciful” are repeated eight times in Sūrat al-Shuʿarāʾ; and sometimes one verse [occurs] in more than one sūra, as the verse “They say, ‘When will this promise be fulfilled, should you be truthful?’” occurs in six different sūras. And likewise sometimes a particular clause is, in one place, a complete verse,

and in another place a part of a verse — as the clause “Allah, there is no god except Him, is the Living One, the All-sustainer” is, at the beginning of Sūrat Āl ʿImrān, a complete verse, and in Sūrat al-Baqara a part of the Verse of the Throne (Āyat al-Kursī). Most of the sūras and verses were sent down once, and do not exceed one place. In every case, this kind of difference among the Qurʾanic verses is the effect of the various requirements of the station of expression, which in one place requires the repetition of a clause and makes it the support of the speech, and sometimes not. Like this difference is another difference that exists among the sūras and verses of the Qurʾān from the standpoint of length and shortness — as Sūrat al-Kawthar, which is the shortest Qurʾanic sūra, and Sūrat al-Baqara, which is the longest of the sūras; and as the verse “Dark green” (mudhāmmatān), which is the smallest Qurʾanic verse and is a single word, and the Verse of Debt (āyat al-dayn), which is verse 282 of Sūrat al-Baqara, the longest verse of the Qurʾān, comprising more than thirty clauses. All these differences are by the requirement of the station of expression — as sometimes it happens between two adjacent verses, like the twentieth and twenty-first verses of Sūrat al-Muddaththir, the first being one clause and the second more than fifteen clauses.

And like this difference is the difference that the verses of the Qurʾanic sūras have from the standpoint of concision (ījāz) and amplitude (iṭnāb), as is clear by comparing the likes of Sūrat al-Fajr and Sūrat al-Layl with the likes of Sūrat al-Baqara and al-Māʾida; and most of the Meccan sūras were sent down in the style of concision, and most of the Medinan sūras in the manner of amplitude. And of this sort is what has been said: that the first verses sent down to the Noble Prophet (ṣ) were Sūrat al-ʿAlaq, or five verses from the beginning of Sūrat al-ʿAlaq; and that the last verse sent down was the noble verse “And beware of a day in which you will be brought back to Allah. Then every soul shall be recompensed fully for what it has earned, and they will not be wronged” (2:281).

C. The Occasions of Revelation

As was noted, many of the Qurʾanic sūras and verses have, from the standpoint of descent, a connection with the events and happenings that occurred during the period of the summons — such as Sūrat al-Baqara³⁷ and Sūrat al-Ḥashr and

Sūrat al-ʿĀdiyāt; or [in which] needs, from the standpoint of the clarifying of the ordinances and laws of Islam, occasioned the descent of sūras or verses that state the needed ordinances — such as³⁸ Sūrat al-Nisāʾ, al-Anfāl, al-Ṭalāq, and their like. These grounds, which occasion the descent of the sūra or verse concerned, are called the occasions of revelation (asbāb al-nuzūl); and, of course, knowing them helps, to some degree, to make clear to a person the case of the descent, and the content that the verse yields with respect to its own particular case of descent. And hence a great throng of the traditionists among the Companions and Successors, in the first age of Islam, set themselves to the fixing and transmitting of the occasions of revelation, and have related countless reports on this head. These reports, by the Sunni routes, are very many, and

reach several thousand reports; and by the Shīʿī routes [they are] few, and are perhaps no more than a few hundred. Of course, not all the reports are supported and sound — rather, many of them are unsupported and weak. But the tracing of these reports and sufficient reflection upon them make a person distrustful of them:

First, the manner of many of them shows plainly that the transmitter did not obtain the connection of the verse’s descent with the [particular] event or happening by way of direct hearing, receiving, and preserving; rather he recounts the tale, and then connects to the tale the verses that are suited, in meaning, to it — and consequently the occasion of revelation mentioned in the ḥadīth is a conjectural, ijtihād-based occasion, not an occasion of revelation obtained by way of observation and preservation. A witness to this saying is that among these reports much contradiction is seen — in the sense that, for many Qurʾanic verses, beneath each verse several mutually contradictory occasions of revelation are related that can never be gathered together; indeed, sometimes, from a single person, such as Ibn ʿAbbās — along with others — several occasions of revelation are related for one particular verse.

The coming of these contradictory and clashing occasions of revelation has no more than one of two vehicles: either it must be said that these occasions of revelation are conjectural, not purely transmitted, and that each of the transmitters of the contradictory reports has laid the verse upon one of the suited tales — other than the tale that is in the other report — and so on; or that a single person, for instance, who relates two divergent occasions of revelation, was caught up in two opposing views and, after the first view, turned toward the second; or it must be said that all the reports, or some of them, are forged or interpolated. With the realization of such possibilities, the reports of the occasions of revelation lose their credit; and hence even the soundness of a report from the standpoint of its chain gives no benefit — for the soundness of the chain removes or weakens the possibility of the falsehood of the men of the chain, but the possibility of interpolation or of the exercise of conjecture remains in its place.

Second, it has been established by transmission that in the first age of Islam the seat of the caliphate strictly prevented the recording and writing of ḥadīth, and that wherever they found a sheet or tablet on which a ḥadīth was written, they seized and burned it; and this ban continued to the end of the first century of the Hijra

— that is, nearly ninety years. This procedure opened the way of transmission-by-meaning (naql bi-l-maʿnā) to the transmitters and traditionists beyond the measure of necessity; and the slight changes that came about at each transmission of a report, little by little, piling up, sometimes carried off the root of the matter — and this is very clear by referring to the cases where, in one tale or matter, reports have come by various routes: one sometimes comes upon reports that, in a tale they jointly recount, have no common ground at all. Of course, the prevalence of transmission-by-meaning, with this looseness, leaves no credit for the occasions of revelation, or at least diminishes their credit. And when the prevalence of forgery and interpolation — and especially the entry of the Isrāʾīliyyāt, and of what was fabricated on the part of the hypocrites (who were not personally recognized) and entered into the reports — is added to the matter of transmission-by-meaning and to what was mentioned in the first objection, no reliance will remain upon the occasions of revelation.

D. The Method to Be Followed regarding the Occasions of Revelation

As became clear in the foregoing sections, ḥadīth stands in need, in its credit, of the confirmation of the Glorious Qurʾān; and on this basis — as has come in many reports from the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) — a ḥadīth must be presented to the Qurʾān. Accordingly, an occasion of revelation that has come beneath a verse — in the case that it is not mass-transmitted, nor a report of certain provenance — must be presented to the verse in question, and only in the case that the content of the verse, and the indications present around the verse, accord with it should the said occasion of revelation be relied upon; in the end, the report must be confirmed and verified by the verse, not the verse placed under the government of the report. In this way, although a large amount of the occasions of revelation falls away, yet what remains of them acquires credit; and fundamentally, the lofty aims of the Glorious Qurʾān — which are universal and perpetual teachings (as will come) — have, in their profiting from the noble verses of the Qurʾān, a negligible need, or no need at all, for the reports of the occasions of revelation.

E. The Order of the Descent of the Sūras

Of course, as we know, the sūras and verses of the Qurʾān are not recorded in the codex in the order in which they were sent down to the Noble Prophet (ṣ). The earlier Islamic scholars — and especially those of the Sunnis — relied, for the order of the descent of the sūras and verses, upon reports. Among the reports that have come on this head is a report from Ibn ʿAbbās,³⁹ who says: The beginning of every sūra that was sent down in Mecca used to be written down there, and after that God Most High would add to it whatever He wished. And the first thing of the Qurʾān that was sent down:

1. Iqraʾ bi-smi rabbik (al-ʿAlaq); 2. then Nūn (al-Qalam); 3. then Yā ayyuha l-muzzammil (al-Muzzammil); 4. then Yā ayyuha l-muddaththir (al-Muddaththir); 5. then Tabbat yadā abī Lahab (al-Masad);

6. then Idhā l-shamsu kuwwirat (al-Takwīr); 7. then Sabbiḥ isma rabbika l-aʿlā (al-Aʿlā); 8. then Wa-l-layli idhā yaghshā (al-Layl); 9. then Wa-l-fajr (al-Fajr); 10. then Wa-l-ḍuḥā (al-Ḍuḥā); 11. then Alam nashraḥ (al-Sharḥ); 12. then Wa-l-ʿaṣr (al-ʿAṣr); 13. then Wa-l-ʿādiyāt (al-ʿĀdiyāt); 14. then Innā aʿṭaynāk (al-Kawthar); 15. then Alhākumu l-takāthur (al-Takāthur); 16. then A-raʾayta lladhī yukadhdhib (al-Māʿūn); 17. then Qul yā ayyuha l-kāfirūn (al-Kāfirūn); 18. then Alam tara kayfa faʿala rabbuk (al-Fīl); 19. then Qul aʿūdhu bi-rabbi l-falaq (al-Falaq); 20. then Qul aʿūdhu bi-rabbi l-nās (al-Nās); 21. then Qul huwa llāhu aḥad (al-Ikhlāṣ); 22. then Wa-l-najm (al-Najm); 23. then ʿAbasa;

24. then Innā anzalnāhu fī laylati l-qadr (al-Qadr); 25. then Wa-l-shamsi wa-ḍuḥāhā (al-Shams); 26. then Wa-l-samāʾi dhāti l-burūj (al-Burūj); 27. then Wa-l-tīn (al-Tīn); 28. then Li-īlāfi Quraysh (Quraysh); 29. then al-Qāriʿa; 30. then Lā uqsimu bi-yawmi l-qiyāma (al-Qiyāma); 31. then Wayl li-kulli humaza (al-Humaza); 32. then Wa-l-mursalāt (al-Mursalāt); 33. then Qāf; 34. then Lā uqsimu bi-hādhā l-balad (al-Balad); 35. then Wa-l-samāʾi wa-l-ṭāriq (al-Ṭāriq); 36. then Iqtarabati l-sāʿa (al-Qamar); 37. then Ṣād; 38. then al-Aʿrāf; 39. then Qul ūḥiya (al-Jinn); 40. then Yā Sīn; 41. then al-Furqān;

42. then al-Malāʾika (Fāṭir); 43. then Kāf Hā Yā ʿAyn Ṣād (Maryam); 44. then Ṭā Hā; 45. then al-Wāqiʿa; 46. then Ṭā Sīn Mīm al-Shuʿarāʾ; 47. then Ṭā Sīn (al-Naml); 48. then al-Qaṣaṣ; 49. then Banī Isrāʾīl (al-Isrāʾ); 50. then Yūnus; 51. then Hūd; 52. then Yūsuf; 53. then al-Ḥijr; 54. then al-Anʿām; 55. then al-Ṣāffāt; 56. then Luqmān; 57. then Sabaʾ; 58. then al-Zumar; 59. then Ḥā Mīm al-Muʾmin (Ghāfir);

60. then Ḥā Mīm al-Sajda (Fuṣṣilat); 61. then Ḥā Mīm ʿAyn Sīn Qāf (al-Shūrā); 62. then Ḥā Mīm al-Zukhruf (al-Zukhruf); 63. then al-Dukhān; 64. then al-Jāthiya; 65. then al-Aḥqāf; 66. then al-Dhāriyāt; 67. then al-Ghāshiya; 68. then al-Kahf; 69. then al-Naḥl; 70. then Innā arsalnā Nūḥan (Nūḥ); 71. then Ibrāhīm; 72. then al-Anbiyāʾ; 73. then al-Muʾminūn; 74. then Tanzīl al-Sajda (al-Sajda); 75. then al-Ṭūr; 76. then Tabāraka (al-Mulk); 77. then al-Ḥāqqa;

78. then Saʾala (al-Maʿārij); 79. then ʿAmma yatasāʾalūn (al-Nabaʾ); 80. then al-Nāziʿāt; 81. then Idhā l-samāʾu nfaṭarat (al-Infiṭār); 82. then Idhā l-samāʾu nshaqqat (al-Inshiqāq); 83. then al-Rūm; 84. then al-ʿAnkabūt; 85. then Wayl li-l-muṭaffifīn (al-Muṭaffifīn). This is what God Most High sent down in Mecca.

86. Then in Medina He sent down Sūrat al-Baqara; 87. then al-Anfāl; 88. then Āl ʿImrān; 89. then al-Aḥzāb; 90. then al-Mumtaḥana; 91. then al-Nisāʾ; 92. then Idhā zulzilat (al-Zalzala); 93. then al-Ḥadīd; 94. then al-Qitāl (Muḥammad);

95. then al-Raʿd; 96. then al-Raḥmān; 97. then al-Insān (al-Dahr); 98. then al-Ṭalāq; 99. then Lam yakun (al-Bayyina); 100. then al-Ḥashr; 101. then Idhā jāʾa naṣru llāh (al-Naṣr); 102. then al-Nūr; 103. then al-Ḥajj; 104. then al-Munāfiqūn; 105. then al-Mujādala; 106. then al-Ḥujurāt; 107. then al-Taḥrīm; 108. then al-Jumuʿa; 109. then al-Taghābun; 110. then al-Ṣaff; 111. then al-Fatḥ; 112. then al-Māʾida;

113. then Barāʾa (al-Tawba).

F. A Look at That Report, and Other Reports

The foregoing report, related from Ibn ʿAbbās, mentioned one hundred and thirteen sūras, and did not count Sūrat al-Ḥamd among them. And another report, which al-Bayhaqī⁴⁰ related from ʿIkrima, counted one hundred and eleven sūras, and did not name three — al-Ḥamd, al-Aʿrāf, and al-Shūrā. And al-Bayhaqī related this same report from Ibn ʿAbbās [as well], and this report comprises all one hundred and fourteen sūras; but both reports of al-Bayhaqī, first, counted Sūrat al-Muṭaffifīn among the Medinan sūras, contrary to the foregoing report, which had taken the said sūra as Meccan; and, second, the order given in these two reports for the Meccan sūras and likewise for the Medinan sūras is at variance with the order stated in the foregoing [report]. And another report⁴¹ has been related from ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalḥa, who

says: In Medina were sent down Sūrat al-Baqara, Āl ʿImrān, al-Nisāʾ, al-Māʾida, al-Anfāl, al-Tawba, al-Ḥajj, al-Nūr, al-Aḥzāb, “Those who disbelieve” [Muḥammad], al-Fatḥ, al-Ḥadīd, al-Mujādala, al-Ḥashr, al-Mumtaḥana, “the Disciples” (Sūrat al-Ṣaff), al-Taghābun, “O Prophet, when you divorce women” (al-Ṭalāq), “O Prophet, why do you forbid” (al-Taḥrīm), al-Fajr, al-Layl, Innā anzalnāhu fī laylati l-qadr (al-Qadr), Lam yakun (al-Bayyina), Idhā zulzilat (al-Zalzala), and Idhā jāʾa naṣru llāh (al-Naṣr); and the rest of the Qurʾanic sūras were sent down in Mecca.

This report, it seems, is only aiming to distinguish the Medinan sūras from the Meccan, not [to give] the order of descent of the sūras it mentions; otherwise, the place of Sūrat al-Māʾida and al-Tawba is, without doubt, lower than where they are mentioned. Besides, it counted the sūras al-Fajr, al-Layl, and al-Qadr among the Medinan sūras, whereas the foregoing reports had counted them among the Meccan; and likewise it took the sūras al-Raʿd, al-Raḥmān, al-Insān, al-Jumuʿa, and al-Ḥujurāt as Meccan, whereas in the foregoing reports they had been taken as Medinan.

And in another report⁴² related from Qatāda, Qatāda says: Of the Qurʾān, there were sent down in Medina al-Baqara, Āl ʿImrān, al-Nisāʾ, al-Māʾida, Barāʾa, al-Raʿd, al-Naḥl, al-Ḥajj, al-Nūr, al-Aḥzāb, Muḥammad, al-Fatḥ, al-Ḥujurāt, al-Ḥadīd, al-Raḥmān, al-Mujādala, al-Ḥashr, al-Mumtaḥana, al-Ṣaff, al-Jumuʿa, al-Munāfiqūn, al-Taghābun, al-Ṭalāq, “O Prophet, why do you forbid” (al-Taḥrīm) — down to thirteen verses [of it] — Idhā zulzilat (al-Zalzala), and Idhā jāʾa naṣru llāh (al-Naṣr); and the rest of the Qurʾān was sent down in Mecca. This report, too, is at variance with the foregoing reports, and especially with Qatāda’s own report concerning al-Muṭaffifīn, al-Insān, and al-Bayyina.

What can be said about these reports is that they are in no way reliable, for they have neither the worth of a religious report nor the worth of a historical transmission. As for the worth of a religious report — because it does not have connection [of chain back] to the Noble Prophet (ṣ); and, moreover, it is not clear whether Ibn ʿAbbās learned this order from the Noble Prophet (ṣ) himself, or from others (who these were is unknown), or by way of view and ijtihād — which has authority for himself alone. And as for the worth of a historical transmission — because Ibn ʿAbbās caught only

a trifling portion of the time of the Noble Prophet’s life in his company, and plainly was not present and witness at the descent of all these Qurʾanic sūras; and if he did not obtain the said order by way of view and ijtihād either, then he heard it from others, and consequently it becomes a report without mention of its source — and such a historical transmission is worthless. Beyond these, these reports, on the supposition of soundness and uprightness, are [each] a single report (khabar wāḥid); and, as has been established in the science of the principles (uṣūl), such a report, in other than the ordinances of the Sacred Law, is void of credit.

So, according to what has passed, the only way to discern the order of the Qurʾanic sūras, and their being Meccan or Medinan, is contemplating their contents and matching them with the conditions and circumstances before and after the Hijra. This method, as far as it goes, is useful for discerning the order of the Qurʾanic sūras and verses and their being Meccan or Medinan — as the contents of the sūras al-Insān, al-ʿĀdiyāt, and al-Muṭaffifīn testify to their being Medinan, even though some of these reports place them among the Meccan sūras.

G. The Gathering of the Qurʾān into One Codex (the Qurʾān before the Passing)

The Glorious Qurʾān, which was sent down sūra by sūra and verse by verse, on account of the extraordinary eloquence and clarity it possessed, grew day by day more renowned among the Arabs — who had a wondrous devotion to eloquence and clarity of speech and were enamoured of it; and to hear a few of its verses they would come to the Noble Prophet (ṣ) from distant roads, hear a few verses, and learn them. And likewise the great ones of Mecca and the powerful of Quraysh, who were idol-worshippers and the stubborn enemies of the Islamic summons, and who, so far as they could, turned people away from drawing near the Noble Prophet (ṣ) — frightening the Arabs off from giving ear to it and hearing it, on the pretext that the Qurʾān was sorcery — with all this, on dark nights, taking advantage of the darkness of night, hidden from one another and from their kinsmen and subordinates, would come and sit near the house of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and listen⁴³ to the Qurʾān that that Ḥaḍrat was reciting.

Of course the Muslims too — since they held the Glorious Qurʾān to be the speech

of God and their sole religious document; and since, in the duty of the prayer, Sūrat al-Ḥamd and a portion of the rest of the Qurʾān had to be recited; and since the Noble Prophet (ṣ) was charged with teaching them the Glorious Qurʾān and the ordinances of Islam (16:44, and many other verses) — used to exert the utmost diligence in learning the sūras and verses of the Qurʾān and in memorizing and fixing them. This procedure, after the Noble Prophet migrated to Medina and formed an independent Islamic community, became more arranged and more organized; and, by the Noble Prophet’s instruction, a considerable body of his companions were charged with the reciting of the Qurʾān and the teaching and learning of the ordinances of Islam, which day by day were being sent down and completed — and they were even excused, by the explicit instruction of the Qurʾān, from participation in war and struggle (9:122).

And since most of the companions of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) — and especially the Companions who had migrated from Mecca to Medina — were unlettered and had no acquaintance with reading and writing, by the Noble Prophet’s instruction use was made of the Jewish captives for the learning of script, which in that time was very simple

and easy; and in this way a lettered group came into being. Of this body, those who occupied themselves with the reciting of the Qurʾān and the memorizing and fixing of its sūras and verses were called the reciters (qurrāʾ); and it was of this group that, at the affair of Biʾr Maʿūna, forty men — or seventy men — were martyred at one time.⁴⁴

And whatever of the Glorious Qurʾān had been sent down, and was likewise being sent down gradually, was written and fixed on tablets, on the shoulder-bones of camels, on palm-stalks, and their like. What can never be doubted or denied is that most of the Qurʾanic sūras were current and well known among the Muslims before the passing: in tens and hundreds of ḥadīths, by the Sunni and Shīʿī routes, in describing the Noble Prophet’s conveying [of the Qurʾān], or his companions’ [reciting], before the passing, and likewise in describing the prayers he prayed and the conduct he had in the recitation of the Qurʾān, the names of these sūras have come. And likewise the names that were current, in the first age of Islam, for the groups of these sūras⁴⁵ — such as the long ones (al-ṭiwāl), the ones of a hundred [verses] (al-miʾīn), the oft-repeated ones (al-mathānī), and the detailed ones (al-mufaṣṣalāt) — are much in evidence in the ḥadīths that recount the time of the Noble Prophet’s life.

H. After the Passing

After the passing of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), ʿAlī (ʿa) — who, by decisive text and the confirmation of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), was the most knowledgeable of all people in the Glorious Qurʾān — secluded himself⁴⁶ in his house and gathered the Glorious Qurʾān, in the order of descent, into one codex; and not yet six months had passed since the passing when he finished, and loaded the codex he had written onto a camel and brought it before the people and showed it.⁴⁷ And after a year and a little⁴⁸ had passed since the passing, the Battle of Yamāma broke out, and in this battle seventy of the reciters were killed; the seat of the caliphate — from fear that another war might befall the Muslims and the rest of the reciters be killed,

and that, through the loss of the bearers of the Qurʾān, the Qurʾān itself be lost — conceived the thought of gathering the Qurʾanic sūras and verses into one codex. By the instruction of the seat of the caliphate, a group of the Companion-reciters, under the direct charge of the Companion Zayd b. Thābit, gathered the Qurʾanic sūras and verses from the tablets, palm-stalks, and shoulder-bones that were in the house of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) in the hand of the scribe of revelation, or with the Companion-reciters, and placed them in one codex; and copies of it were sent to [various] regions and quarters.

After a while, in the caliphate of⁴⁹ the third caliph, it was brought to the caliph’s notice that, through the laxity and negligence people had shown in copying and reciting the Qurʾān, differences had come about, and that by this the Book of God was severely threatened with alteration and change. The seat of the caliphate, to prevent this danger, instructed that the codex that had first been written by the order of the first caliph — and was with Ḥafṣa, the wife of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and daughter of the second caliph — be taken on loan, and charged five of the Companion-reciters (one of whom was again Zayd b. Thābit, who had been in charge of the gathering of the first codex)

to make copies of it that should be the master of the rest of the copies; and instructed that the Qurʾāns in the hands of the people in the provinces be collected and sent to Medina; and whatever of these Qurʾāns reached Medina was, by the caliph’s order, burned (or, as some historians say, boiled). At last several copies were written, one of which they kept in Medina, and [others] they sent — one to Mecca, one to Syria, one to Kūfa, and one to Baṣra; and it is said that, besides these five copies, one copy was also sent to Yemen and one to Bahrain. These are the copies that are called the “Imām codex” (muṣḥaf al-imām), and are the master of the rest of the copies. The difference⁵⁰ these copies have with the first codex in order is only this: that in the first codex Sūrat Barāʾa had been placed among the miʾīn, and Sūrat al-Anfāl too had its place among the mathānī, while in the Imām codex they recorded al-Anfāl and Barāʾa together, between Sūrat al-Aʿrāf and Sūrat Yūnus.

I. The Muslims’ Concern for the Affair of the Qurʾān

As was pointed out earlier, at the time of the gathering of the Qurʾān — both the first and the second time — the Qurʾanic sūras and verses were in the hands of the general Muslims, and they exerted the utmost diligence in preserving what they had; moreover, a large group of the Companions and Successors were reciters of the Qurʾān who had no other occupation; and the gathering of the Qurʾān into one codex took place before everyone’s eyes, and all accepted the codex that was prepared and placed within their reach, took copies of it, and did not reject or object.

Indeed, even at the ʿUthmānic gathering (the second gathering), they wanted to record the noble verse “those who treasure up gold and silver” (Sūrat al-Tawba, 9:34) in the codex without the [initial connective] wāw; [people] prevented it, and the Companion Ubayy b. Kaʿb,⁵¹ in the posture of a threat, swore that if they dropped the wāw he would draw his sword and fight them — and in the end they recorded the wāw. The second caliph,⁵² during his own caliphate, one day read the clause “and those who followed them in virtue”

in the verse “The early vanguard of the Emigrants and the Helpers and those who followed them in virtue” (Sūrat al-Tawba, 9:100) without the connective wāw; [people] rose in dispute with him until, at last, they compelled the caliph to read it with the wāw.

ʿAlī (ʿa), although he had himself, before that, gathered the Glorious Qurʾān in the order of descent and shown it to the community — and it had not been accepted, and they had not included him in either the first or the second gathering — with all this showed no kind of opposition or resistance, accepted the current codex, and, as long as he lived, even during his own caliphate, breathed no word of dissent. And likewise the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt, who are that Ḥaḍrat’s successors and children, never said a word — even to the elect of their own Shīʿa — against the credit of the Glorious Qurʾān; rather they ever, in their statements, sought support in it, and commanded their Shīʿa to follow the recitation of the people;⁵³ and one may say, with boldness, that ʿAlī’s silence — although the ordinary codex differed from his codex in order — was on this account: that in the disposition of the Ahl al-Bayt the exegesis of the Qurʾān by the Qurʾān

is authoritative, and in this method the order of the Meccan and Medinan sūras and verses has no effect upon the lofty aims of the Qurʾān; and in the exegesis of each verse the totality of the Qurʾanic verses must be taken into view — for a speech that is universal and perpetual must not, in the generalities of its aims and contents, be affected by the peculiarities of the time, place, and events of the moment of descent, which are called the occasions of revelation. Yes, in knowing these peculiarities one may obtain benefits — such as the clarifying of the history of the emergence of the teachings, ordinances, and partial tales that were contemporary with the descent, and of the manner of the advance of the Islamic summons over the twenty-three years of the age of the mission, and their like. But the preserving of Islamic unity (as has ever been the aim of the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt) is more important than these partial benefits.

J. The Glorious Qurʾān Is Preserved from Every Kind of Alteration (taḥrīf)

The history of the Glorious Qurʾān, from the day of descent until today, is completely clear; the sūras and verses of the Qurʾān have ever been on the tongues of the Muslims and have passed from hand to hand.

And we all know that the Qurʾān in our hands is the very Qurʾān that was sent down, gradually, to the Noble Prophet (ṣ) fourteen centuries ago. With all this, the Glorious Qurʾān ought not to stand in need of history for the credit and establishment of its own reality — though its history is clear too; for a book that claims to be the speech of God, argues for this claim by its own text, and has taken up the posture of challenge, holding all men and jinn incapable of bringing its like, can no longer need, in establishing that it is the speech of God and that no alteration or change has befallen it and it is as it was, any proof or witness other than itself, nor take refuge, in the establishing of its credit, in the confirmation of some person or office.

Yes, the clearest proof that the Qurʾān in our hands today is the very Qurʾān that was sent down to the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and has undergone no change or alteration is this: that the attributes and distinctions the Glorious Qurʾān stated for itself still remain, and are as they were. The Glorious Qurʾān says: I am a book of light and guidance, and I guide man

toward truth and reality. It says: I am a book that makes [things] clear, and I clarify whatever man needs in his life and whatever accords with the nature of man. It says: I am the speech of God; and if you say it is the speech of other than God, let men and jinn gather and bring such a speech, or bring such a book from a person like the Noble Prophet (ṣ) — unschooled, not having learned to write, grown up in a milieu like that of the Age of Ignorance, in orphanhood and without a tutor — or find in this book, like every speech that man utters, some discrepancy or difference in its style, or in the teachings and ordinances it states.

These attributes and distinctions remain in the Glorious Qurʾān in their own state. As for the guidance the Glorious Qurʾān makes toward truth and reality: this very Qurʾān present within our reach, with its eloquent and reaching expression, makes clear a complete course of worldview that accords with the most exact rational proofs and is the support of man’s most felicitous life, and, with the utmost benevolence and foresight, invites people to faith in it.

And as for the stating of all the needs of man’s life: the Glorious Qurʾān, with its realism, has set the oneness of the God of the world as its principal basis, derives all the doctrinal teachings from it, and at this stage has not neglected or been heedless of the smallest point. After that it derives the excellent human morals from this same [source] and sets to clarifying them. After that it turns to the stage of man’s individual and social acts and deeds, and, according to what the nature and creation of man show, states the generalities of the human duties, and refers their particulars and peculiarities to the Sunna of the Noble Prophet. And from the totality of the Book and the Sunna the vast religion of Islam, with its astounding breadth, is obtained — a religion that has attended to all the fine points and aspects, individual and social, of man’s life, for all and for ever, and issues a positive ruling, without the least contradiction or repulsion arising among its parts and materials.

A religion the mere conceiving of the index of whose questions is beyond the power of the most powerful jurists of the world in the whole span of their lives. And as for the inimitability (iʿjāz) of the Glorious Qurʾān in its expression: although the extraordinary style of the Qurʾān is of the genus of the Arab dialect of the age of the eloquence and rhetoric of the Arab nation — which is a radiant piece in the history of languages, peculiar to the Arabs, and which, in the period of the Islamic conquests in the first century of the Hijra, through the mingling of the Arabic language with foreign languages, passed away, so that now the dialect of Arabic discourse, like other languages, is far and estranged from the eloquent dialect of that day — yet the Glorious Qurʾān does not challenge with the style of its wording alone, but challenges and claims inimitability by its meaning-aspects as well as its wording-aspects. With all this, those who have acquaintance with the Arabic language and have traced its verse and prose can never doubt that the dialect of the Qurʾān is an eloquent and sweet dialect that leaves man’s perception dazzled at its beauty and makes the tongue halting and feeble to describe it — it is neither verse nor prose, but a style beyond both, which

has an attraction and pull above verse, and a fluency and smoothness above prose; a verse of the Qurʾān, or a clause of it, found amid a sermon of the past masters of eloquence, or of the able writers of today, is like a lamp set in a dark night-chamber, casting them under its own radiance. And from the standpoint of the non-verbal meaning-aspects too, the inimitability of the Qurʾān remains as it is: the vast organization of the doctrinal and moral teachings, and of the individual and social practical laws, of Islam — whose principles and generalities are in the Glorious Qurʾān — its flawless, contradiction-free, unassailable arrangement is beyond the power of man, and especially at the hands of one placed in conditions like the conditions of the Noble Prophet’s life. And likewise, the sending down of a book that, like the Qurʾān, is uniform and of like parts, and that was sent down over twenty-three years, in the ground of conditions and circumstances of the utmost diversity — in ease and comfort and in hardship, fear, and insecurity; in war and in peace; in solitude and among the throng and press of people; on a journey and at home — sūra by sūra and verse by verse, without any discrepancy, is impossible.

In sum, all the attributes that the Qurʾān of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) had, this same Qurʾān has; so no change or alteration whatever has found its way into the Glorious Qurʾān. Moreover, God Most High has Himself given news of the immunity of the Qurʾān, as He says: “Indeed We have sent down the Reminder, and indeed We will preserve it” (15:9); and He says: “falsehood cannot approach it, from before it nor from behind it, a [gradually] sent down [revelation] from One all-wise, all-laudable” (41:42). By the requirement of these verses, the Glorious Qurʾān — and especially from the standpoint that it is the Reminder of God and the guide to the true teachings — is, by the divine immunity, immune, and, from the harm of destroying accidents, under the safeguard of God the Preserver. And by the effect of that same divine promise (the verse of the Qurʾān’s preservation), the Glorious Qurʾān, up to now — fourteen centuries since its descent — with the existence of hundreds and thousands of millions of enemies, has remained immune and preserved, and is the only heavenly book that has passed a long age among mankind with immunity.

K. The Recitation of the Qurʾān and Its Memorization and Transmission

As we have pointed out many times, during the lifetime of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) an organized body in Medina occupied itself with the recitation of the Qurʾān and its teaching and learning; they would hear the Qurʾanic verses that were sent down gradually from the mouth of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), and sometimes recite them before him and present them to him. A number were, in recitation, the source of teaching and instruction, and those who took from them ascribed the manner of their own recitation, in the form of a transmission (riwāya), to their teacher, and generally set to memorizing what they had taken.

And naturally the existing situation, too, required such memorization and transmission: for, on the one hand, the script current for writing in that day was the Kūfic script, which had no dots or vowel-marks, and each word could be read in various forms; and, on the other hand, the general people were unlettered and had no way but memorization and transmission for the fixing of the speech; and this same method became the followed practice and remained as a keepsake for the coming ages too.

L. The Classes of the Reciters

The first of the classes of reciters they have counted to be the very Companions who, in the age of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), occupied themselves with its teaching and learning; and a number of them had gathered the whole Qurʾān — among them a woman named Umm Waraqa, daughter of ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Ḥārith.⁵⁴ (What is meant by “gathering the Qurʾān,” which in some reports is ascribed to four of the Anṣār, in some to five, in some to six, and in some to more, is the learning and memorizing of the whole Qurʾān, not the compiling and

ordering of its sūras and verses; otherwise there would have been no occasion for the two instances of gathering and ordering the codex in the time of the first caliph and the third caliph. And likewise, what has come in some reports — that the place of each of the sūras and verses of the Glorious Qurʾān was fixed and specified by the instruction of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) himself — is a matter that the rest of the reports generally belie.) And, as some scholars⁵⁵ have said, several of this class were renowned for teaching the recitation of the Qurʾān: ʿUthmān, ʿAlī (ʿa), Ubayy b. Kaʿb, Zayd b. Thābit, ʿAbd Allāh b. Masʿūd, and Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī.

The second class are the students of the first class, who are generally of the Successors; and their well-known ones, who had circles of recitation in the cities of Mecca, Medina, Kūfa, Baṣra, and Syria and occupied themselves with teaching the Qurʾān — and, of course, these five cities are the places where the ʿUthmānic codices were:

In Mecca: ʿUbayd b. ʿUmayr, ʿAṭāʾ b. Abī Rabāḥ, Ṭāwūs, Mujāhid, ʿIkrima, Ibn Abī Mulayka, and others. In Medina: Ibn al-Musayyab, ʿUrwa, Sālim, ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, Sulaymān b. Yasār, ʿAṭāʾ b. Yasār, Muʿādh al-Qārī, ʿAbd Allāh al-Aʿraj, Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī, Muslim b. Jundab, and Zayd b. Aslam. In Kūfa: ʿAlqama, al-Aswad, Masrūq, ʿUbayda, ʿAmr b. Shuraḥbīl, al-Ḥārith b. Qays, al-Rabīʿ b. Khuthaym, ʿAmr b. Maymūn, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī, Zirr b. Ḥubaysh, ʿUbayd b. Naḍla, Saʿīd b. Jubayr, al-Nakhaʿī, and al-Shaʿbī. In Baṣra: Abū l-ʿĀliya, Abū Rajāʾ, Naṣr b. ʿĀṣim, Yaḥyā b. Yaʿmar, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, Ibn Sīrīn, and Qatāda. In Syria: al-Mughīra b. Abī Shihāb (of ʿUthmān’s companions), and Khalīfa b. Saʿd (of the companions of the Companion Abū l-Dardāʾ).

The third class, which corresponds roughly to the first half of the second century, are a company of the famous imams of recitation who took from the second class: In Mecca: ʿAbd Allāh b. Kathīr (one of the seven reciters), Ḥumayd b. Qays al-Aʿraj, and Muḥammad b. Abī Muḥayṣin.

In Medina: Abū Jaʿfar Yazīd b. al-Qaʿqāʿ, Shayba b. Naṣṣāḥ, and Nāfiʿ b. Nuʿaym (one of the seven reciters). In Kūfa: Yaḥyā b. Waththāb, ʿĀṣim b. Abī al-Najūd (one of the seven), Sulaymān al-Aʿmash, Ḥamza (one of the seven), and al-Kisāʾī (one of the seven). In Baṣra: ʿAbd Allāh b. Abī Isḥāq, ʿĪsā b. ʿUmar, Abū ʿAmr b. al-ʿAlāʾ (one of the seven), ʿĀṣim al-Jaḥdarī, and Yaʿqūb al-Ḥaḍramī. In Syria: ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿĀmir (one of the seven), ʿAṭiyya b. Qays al-Kilābī, Ismāʿīl b. ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Muhājir, Yaḥyā b. al-Ḥārith, and Shurayḥ b. Yazīd al-Ḥaḍramī.

The fourth class are the students and transmitters of the third class — such as Ibn ʿAyyāsh, Ḥafṣ, and Khalaf, whose well-known ones will be mentioned in the coming section. The fifth class is the class of the people of research and composition; and, as they have said, the first to compose on recitation⁵⁶ was Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām, then Aḥmad b. Jubayr al-Kūfī, then

Ismāʿīl b. Isḥāq al-Mālikī, of the companions of Qālūn the transmitter, then Abū Jaʿfar Ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, then al-Dājūnī, then [Ibn] Mujāhid. After these, the scope of research and inquiry widened, and the likes of al-Dānī and al-Shāṭibī⁵⁷ wrote countless books and treatises in verse and prose.

M. The Seven Reciters

Seven of the reciters of the third class gained a considerable renown among the people and acquired an authoritativeness that put the rest in the shade; and likewise their transmitters, although many, came — in the case of each — to be fixed at two transmitters from among the transmitters. The seven reciters and their transmitters are, in the following order: First, Ibn Kathīr⁵⁸ al-Makkī; his transmitters are Qunbul and al-Bazzī.

Second, Nāfiʿ al-Madanī; his transmitters are Qālūn and Warsh. Third, ʿĀṣim al-Kūfī; his transmitters are Abū Bakr Shuʿba b. ʿAyyāsh and Ḥafṣ — and the Qurʾān current today among the people accords with the recitation of ʿĀṣim by the transmission of Ḥafṣ. Fourth, Ḥamza al-Kūfī; his transmitters are Khalaf and Khallād, via one intermediary.

Fifth, al-Kisāʾī al-Kūfī; his transmitters are al-Dūrī and Abū l-Ḥārith. Sixth, Abū ʿAmr b. al-ʿAlāʾ al-Baṣrī; his transmitters are al-Dūrī and al-Sūsī, via one intermediary. Seventh, Ibn ʿĀmir; his transmitters are Hishām and Ibn Dhakwān, via

one intermediary. And next in renown to the seven recitations are the recitations of the three reciters, who are Abū Jaʿfar, Yaʿqūb, and Khalaf.⁵⁹ Other recitations too have been related — such as the recitations that have come, scattered, from the Companions; and likewise the anomalous (shādhdh) recitations, which have not been given heed; and likewise scattered recitations related from the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (ʿa) — but other reports have come from them commanding the following of the well-known recitations.

The generality of the Sunnī scholars hold the seven recitations to be mass-transmitted (mutawātir), and a company have even construed the well-known Prophetic report⁶⁰ “the Qurʾān was sent down according to seven letters” as [referring to] the seven recitations — [whereas] the seven recitations are [only] well-known (mashhūr), not mass-transmitted. Zarkashī,⁶¹ in the book al-Burhān, says: “The truth is that these seven recitations reached us, from the seven reciters, by mass transmission; but their mass transmission from the Noble Prophet (ṣ) is a matter of consideration and pause, for the chains of the seven reciters to these recitations are present in the book of recitation, and all these chains are of the kind of single-from-single transmission.” And Makkī,⁶² in his book, says: “Whoever supposes that the recitation of these reciters — such as Nāfiʿ and ʿĀṣim — is the very seven letters that came in

the Prophetic ḥadīth has fallen into a gross error; and the entailment of this supposition is that the recitation of any reciter of the leaders other than these seven should not be a recitation of the Qurʾān — and this is a great mistake, for the ancient scholars who gathered the recitations and composed [on them] — such as Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām, Abū Ḥātim al-Sijistānī, Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭabarī, and Ismāʿīl al-Qāḍī — mentioned several times these [and other] reciters. At the head of two hundred [AH], the people in Baṣra used the recitation of Abū ʿAmr and Yaʿqūb; in Kūfa, the recitation of Ḥamza and ʿĀṣim; in Syria, the recitation of Ibn ʿĀmir; in Mecca, the recitation of Ibn Kathīr; and in Medina, the recitation of Nāfiʿ was current; and for a time they were in this state, until, at the head of three hundred [AH], Ibn Mujāhid struck out the name of Yaʿqūb and put the name of al-Kisāʾī in his place. And the reason that the people — though there were among the reciters many like them or better than them — paid no heed [to those] and turned to the recitation of the seven, was this: that the transmitters of the imams became very many, and aspirations fell short of fixing and memorizing all these transmissions of recitation, so they resolved to choose several of those whose recitation agreed with the codex-orthography and was easier as to fixing and memorizing.

Hence, observing the number of the five codices that ʿUthmān had sent to the cities of Mecca, Medina, Kūfa, Baṣra, and Syria, they chose from these five cities five reciters and used their recitation — as Ibn Jubayr, in a book he wrote, like Ibn Mujāhid, on the recitations, mentioned of the seven reciters only five, from five cities. And after that, Ibn Mujāhid and others, heeding another report according to which ʿUthmān sent two other codices to Yemen and Bahrain (so that the number of the ʿUthmānic codices is seven), chose seven of the reciters; and since no news is at hand of the codices sent to Yemen and Bahrain, they appointed two reciters of Kūfa to complete the number and added [them] to the previous five, and in this way the number of the reciters became seven. And, on the other hand, this number, by coincidence, came to agree with the number mentioned in the Prophetic report ‘the Qurʾān was sent down according to seven letters,’ and

fell into the hands of those who were unaware of the root of the matter, [who] perforce supposed that what was meant by the seven letters that the Noble Prophet (ṣ) stated was the very seven recitations. In any case, the reliable recitation is that whose transmission-chain is sound, agrees with the rules of Arabic, and matches the codex-orthography.” (The words of Makkī are ended.) And Qarrāb,⁶³ in [his] al-Mathānī, says: “As to [the claim] that ‘we must cling to the recitation of seven reciters and not others,’ there is neither report nor sunna; rather, some of the later ones gathered these seven recitations, and it spread abroad — then this misconception arose, that others cannot be read, whereas no one has said such a thing.”

N. The Number of the Qurʾanic Verses

The counting of the Qurʾanic verses reaches [back to] the time of the Noble Prophet, and in reports from that Ḥaḍrat the verses are mentioned by number — such as ten verses of Āl ʿImrān — and even from that Ḥaḍrat the number of the verses of some of the Qurʾanic sūras has come, such as that Sūrat al-Ḥamd⁶⁴ is seven verses and Sūrat al-Mulk⁶⁵ thirty verses.

In the number of the total of the Qurʾanic verses there are — as is related from Abū ʿAmr al-Dānī⁶⁶ — six opinions: some have said the total of the verses of the Qurʾān is six thousand verses; and it is said six thousand two hundred and four; and it is said six thousand two hundred and fourteen; and it is said six thousand two hundred and nineteen; and it is said six thousand two hundred and twenty-five; and it is said six thousand two hundred and thirty-six verses. And of these six opinions, two belong to the reciters of the people of Medina, and four to the reciters of the four other cities that had the ʿUthmānic codex: Mecca, Kūfa, Baṣra, and Syria. The people of each of these six opinions carry their own number, by way of transmission, back to the age of the Companions, and then, reckoning it a “suspended” report, ascribe it to the Noble Prophet; and hence the generality reckon the number of the verses and

the discerning of the verse[-divisions] to be fixed by [prophetic] authorization (tawqīf). The number of the people of Medina⁶⁷ is two numbers: one, the number of Abū Jaʿfar Yazīd b. al-Qaʿqāʿ and Shayba b. Naṣṣāḥ; and the other, the number of Ismāʿīl b. Jaʿfar b. Abī Kathīr al-Anṣārī. The number of the people of Mecca is the number of Ibn Kathīr, who relates it from Mujāhid, from Ibn ʿAbbās, from Ubayy b. Kaʿb. The number of the people of Kūfa is the number of Ḥamza, al-Kisāʾī, and Khalaf, and Ḥamza relates it from Ibn Abī Laylā, from Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī, from ʿAlī (ʿa). The number of the people of Baṣra is the number of ʿĀṣim b. al-ʿAjjāj al-Jaḥdarī. And the number of the people of Syria is the number of Ibn Dhakwān and Hishām b. ʿAmmār, and they ascribe it to Abū l-Dardāʾ. And, of course, the difference in the number of the total of the Qurʾanic verses arises from the difference in the number of the verses of the [individual] sūras; and other enumerations, too, concerning the number of the letters and words of the Qurʾanic sūras and of the whole Qurʾān, have been mentioned, the setting-out of which is not important for us.

O. The Names of the Qurʾanic Sūras

The division of the Noble Qurʾān into sūras, like its division into verses, has a Qurʾanic root; and God Most High, in several places of His speech, has brought the name of “sūra,” as He has brought the name of “verse (āya)”: “[This is] a sūrah which We have sent down” (24:1); “and whenever a sūrah is sent down” (9:86); “then bring a sūrah like it” (2:23); and the like of these verses. The naming of a sūra is done sometimes with a name that occurs in that sūra, or a subject it has discussed — as one says Sūrat al-Baqara, Sūrat Āl ʿImrān, Sūrat al-Isrāʾ, Sūrat al-Tawḥīd; and as is much seen in the old Qurʾāns, where at the head of the sūra they write “the sūra in which the Cow is mentioned” and “the sūra in which the Family of ʿImrān is mentioned.” And sometimes a clause from the beginning of the sūra is mentioned and made the identifier of that sūra — as one says “the sūra Iqraʾ bi-smi rabbik,” “the sūra Innā anzalnāhu,” “the sūra Lam yakun,” and their like. And sometimes they identify [the sūra] by an attribute the sūra has — as one says “the sūra Fātiḥat al-Kitāb,”⁶⁸ “the sūra Umm al-Kitāb

and al-Sabʿ al-Mathānī,” “the sūra al-Ikhlāṣ,”⁶⁹ “the sūra Nisbat al-Rabb,” and their like. These methods, by the witness of the remains at hand, were current in the first age of Islam too; and even in the Prophetic reports, on the tongue of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), the naming of the Qurʾanic sūras — such as Sūrat al-Baqara, Sūrat Āl ʿImrān, Sūrat Hūd, and Sūrat al-Wāqiʿa — is much seen; and hence one may say that many of these names, in the age of the Noble Prophet (ṣ), through frequency of use, became fixed, and have no aspect of legal authorization (tawqīf) whatever.

P. The Script and Vowelling of the Glorious Qurʾān

The Glorious Qurʾān, in the time of the Noble Prophet (ṣ) and the first and second centuries, was copied in the Kūfic script; and the ambiguity of the Kūfic script (as passed) necessitated the emergence of the apparatus of memorization, transmission, and recitation; yet the trouble of ambiguity was not

resolved wholly and generally, and it was only the memorizers and transmitters who were acquainted with the correct pronunciation of the Qurʾān; and for anyone who opened the codex and wished to recite, correct recitation was not easy. Hence, at the end of the first century of the Hijra, Abū l-Aswad al-Duʾalī, of the companions of ʿAlī (ʿa) — [drawing on] the grammar of the Arabic language which, by that Ḥaḍrat’s guidance, he had written — by the order of ʿAbd al-Malik the Umayyad caliph, laid down the dotting of the letters, and in this way the ambiguity of the script was to some degree removed. But still the trouble of ambiguity was resolved [only] in part, not in whole, until al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad, the well-known grammarian who was the founder of the science of prosody, devised signs for the manners of pronouncing the letters — the prolongation (madd), the doubling (tashdīd), fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, sukūn, tanwīn joined to one of the three vowels, rawm, and ishmām — and in this way the ambiguity of pronunciation was removed. And before that,⁷⁰ for a time, the vowels of the letters were indicated by a dot: in place of fatḥa a dot was put above the letter at its beginning, in place of kasra beneath the letter at the beginning, and in place of ḍamma above the letter at its end — and this method sometimes caused increased ambiguity.

The End

There follow, in the original, the appendices to the book (print pages 223–269): (1) an index of proper names; (2) an index of places; (3) an index of the books cited in the book; (4) an index of the Qurʾanic verses; (5) an index of the reports (ḥadīth); and (6) a table of contents. These are reference apparatus and are not reproduced in this translation.