In his universal history of Qur’an commentary, Muḥammad Fāḍil Ibn ʿĀshūr (d. 1970),
the Grand Mufti of Tunisia for most of the twentieth century, states that he considers
al-Bayḍāwī’s (d. 719/1319) Anwār al-tanzīl to be the crowning achievement of the
Islamic commentary tradition on the Qur’an.2 He also notes that the Anwār became the
standard tafsīr used in teaching the science of Qur’an commentary all over the Islamic
world, and that hundreds of glosses (or super-commentaries, haẉ āshī) were written on
this work by the professors who taught it.3 Anwār al-tanzīl was thus the prism through
which Islamic civilisation understood the Qur’an and, according to the historical
narrative of Ibn ʿĀshūr, it was the culmination of seven centuries of development and
perfection of the tafsīr genre, a reason for its continuous sway across the following
centuries. Ibn ʿĀshūr was a remnant of a scholastic Ashʿarī–Sunni tradition that was all
but wiped out by the deluge that is Salafism. Still, he remembered his history too well to
subscribe to the new Salafī narratives told about Qur’an commentaries. Ibn ʿĀshūr’s
valiant defence notwithstanding, the ubiquity and complete dominance of the Anwār,
however, had been displaced by the middle of the twentieth century, and apart from
the seminaries which still used this work as a text book due to their conservative
curriculum, the Anwār had been replaced by Ibn Kathīr’s Qur’an commentary as the
most popular tafsīr among Sunni Muslims. The story of the rise and fall of the Anwār
has never been told, and given how central the debate about the Qur’an among Muslims
is, a historical account of this once authoritative Qur’an commentary is overdue.
Ibn ʿĀshūr’s astute historical acumen made him one of the few modern Muslim
historians (if not the only one) to rightly insist that Anwār al-tanzīl was the most
important work in the history of the tafsīr genre, yet he was mistaken about the details of how its dominance came about. He projected the popularity of the Anwār back to the
moment it was written, in the late seventh/thirteenth century, whereas, I argue here,
actually the popularity of this work accrued gradually; it became ubiquitous only after
the beginning of the eleventh/seventeenth century. Ibn ʿĀshūr could not conceive that
prior to the adoption of Anwār al-tanzīl by the Sunni establishment, al-Kashshāf, the
Qur’an commentary written by the Muʿtazilī al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), was the
textbook used by the Sunnis in their seminaries, and that it took a few centuries for
the Anwār to replace it. Looking back at the abundance of glosses on al-Kashshāf and
their extensive citation in the glosses on the Anwār, Ibn ʿĀshūr presumed that the
glosses on al-Kashshāf written by Muslim scholars reflected their interest in the Anwār.
His argument was that since Anwār al-tanzīl was a work that summarised and reshaped
al-Kashshāf, any academic study of the Anwār must have entailed serious attention to
the archetype, hence the obsessive scholarly interest of the Muslims in al-Kashshāf.
4
I would argue that the story, however, is more convoluted, and this article attempts to
outline the history of Anwār al-tanzīl and how radically the modern era reshaped both
the history of the tafsīr genre and the hierarchy of Qur’anic exegetical texts among
Muslims.