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Commentary on the Qurʼān, as both activity and achievement, has been a remarkably stable enterprise over the long centuries of its production. The tradition of Qurʼānic exegesis continues to occupy a prominent place within contemporary Muslim intellectual life. In general, the extant commentaries on the Qurʼān represent a large and sustained range of literary output from at least the 9th to the 12th centuries with certain seminal works that predate even that span. The Qurʼān was so central to the intellectual life of medieval Islam that its verses and their interpretation appear in virtually all forms of Islamic literature. This chapter presents an overview of medieval interpretation of the Qurʼān, the chronology and classification of Qurʼānic commentary, varieties of exegetical material, questions posed by the commentators of the Qurʼān (for example, abrogation and applicability), and the continuity of Qurʼānic commentary.

In verse 119 of sūrat al-Nisā, the fourth sūrat of the Qurʼān, Satan is quoted as having said about the pagans, “I will lead them astray, and fill them with fancies, and I will command them and they will cut off the cattle's ears: I will command them and they will alter God's creation”. What precisely was meant by the phrase “alter God's creation” apparently gave rise to vehement debate in the early period of Qurʼānic commentary. The argument centers on the phrases “nature” and “natural order”, as well as the word “a'rāf” which is taken to denote the limbo between paradise and hell. Many later Qurʼān commentators, like al-Tabarī and al-Samarqandī, considered these debates about the meaning of many passages in the word of God as revealed to the Apostle of Islam as having really occurred among the founders of Qurʼānic commentary. They extrapolated them from the enormous mass of traditions that they collected and presented in their commentaries.

Medieval and even modem exegeses of the Qurʼān are heavily indebted to the commentary purporting to come from the first three centuries of Islam. At an early stage, many Muslim exegetes attempted to limit the scope of possible meanings of the Qurʼān by demanding that exegesis be based on the received tradition, and not on personal opinion. Thus, most early and medieval Qurʼānic exegesis comes in the form of hadīths—the same form that dominates Islamic legal and historical writings. Skepticism regarding the authenticity of hadīths was first expressed by Ignaz Goldziher, who was backed by Joseph Schacht. Together, Goldziher and Schacht seem to undermine the very foundation upon which Muslim law and history as well as Qurʼānic interpretation have been built. Nabia Abbott, Fuat Sezgin, and Mohammad Azami, however, have each argued for a continuous written and oral transmission of hadīths. Other scholars who have addressed the authenticity of hadīths are John Wansbrough, Heribert Horst, and Georg Stauth.

As a sacred book recording divine revelation, the Qurʼān is widely understood by Muslims to have a significant meaning because God certainly meant what he explicitly said. Since early Islamic times, however, the Qurʼān has also been understood as possessing many “faces” or aspects. This multifaceted character of the Qurʼān is manifested in the many different types of verses it contains, but is also apparent in the fact that many individual verses can each be read and interpreted in a variety of ways. As is shown by Ignaz Goldziher's study of the major sources of Qurʼānic exegesis, as well as by other important Qurʼān commentaries that have come to light since the compilation of his groundbreaking work three quarters of a century ago, many of these trends of interpretation are based on a specific selection of Qurʼānic verses. In such a way Sūfīsm, Islamic mysticism, developed its own approach to Qurʼānic exegesis and formed its own body of Qurʼān commentary.

Sūfī Qurʼān interpretation is well known for both its beautiful metaphors and enigmatic mystical depths. From Sahl al-Tustarī to Pseudo-Ibn al-Arabī—and even before and after these protagonists—this literature flourished among other genres of mystical literature, often using the Qurʼān as an external framework or even only as a pretext to give expression to mystical ideas, metaphors, similitudes, or stories. Mystical metaphors occur in several Sūfī commentaries of the Qurʼān, for example with regard to the famous Verse of Light in Q 24:35 or the dog that accompanied the famous Sleepers in Q 18:18 and in many other instances. Most Sūfī authors, however, do not go much further than using similes and metaphors in their Qurʼānic interpretations. One can discern a clear trend of avoidance of the use of allegories in Sūfī Qurʼān interpretation, as in most medieval Muslim religious literature. One reason is that allegory was seen as a potential threat to religious thought and practice, especially with respect to the basic dogmas of Islam and the punctilious performance of the religious commandments.

One of the fundamental ingredients of Qurʼānic commentaries is elucidation of who is addressed or referred to in the various passages of the scripture. For example, Q 2:6–7 refers to a group that disbelieves and that will continue to refuse to believe, whether “you” warn them or not. It is the commentators who identify for us the “you” and the group of unbelievers. There is unanimity that the “you” addressed is the prophet Muhammad, but disagreement about the unbelievers: some commentators understood it as a reference to the Jews of Medina, some to the pagans of Mecca. Traditional exegesis establishes not only the possibilities for the interpretation of the various parts of the Qurʼān but also the limits within which those possibilities are confined. The Qurʼān presents a two-sided general image of the opponents: on the one hand vocabulary with connotations of idolatry and polytheism is applied to them; on the other, they appear to know about the one God and to share some of the concepts of the monotheist religion, especially the eschatological ones.

The self-referentiality of the Qurʼān is increasingly viewed as one of its central features. Given the fact that the Qurʼān is primarily a text to be recited to an audience, this self-referentiality reflects a constant challenge in which the audience questions the Qurʼānic recitation and that Qurʼānic recitation, in turn, reacts. Some of the terms with which the Qurʼānic revelation referred to itself seemed to later generations to be contradictory or at least in need of clarification. “The Qurʼān” was “sent down” in a single night of one month, yet it was revealed to the prophet Muhammad during a long period of time. The locus classicus in which the Qurʼānic revelation sets the tone for the history of Qurʼānic exegesis is Sūra 3:7. John Wansbrough once called this verse, with its distinction between “clear” and “ambiguous” verses, “a passage, unanimously agreed to represent the point of departure for all scriptural exegesis”. This chapter examines the scriptural prehistory of this verse and places it within the broader perspective of the self-referential character of many Qurʼānic passages.

Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūtī, who died in 911/1505, wrote at least two separate works on “foreign” words in the Qurʼān. Al-Suyūtī's compendium of the Qurʼānic “sciences”, al-Itqān fī ʼulūm al-Qurʼān, also contains a chapter on “foreign vocabulary”. His works exhibit an attribute of the mature Muslim exegesis which Norman Calder has termed its “fundamentally acquisitive” nature. The material al-Suyūtī presents on foreign words has been culled from many sources and contains several substantial differences of opinion on any given item. In analyzing the lists of foreign words compiled by al-Suyūtī, it is easy to see the reasons behind the inclusion of some of the words: difficult morphological structures, barren roots, and irregular phonetic features. The isolation of these features, of course, depended upon the establishment of a set of criteria to define Arabic as such. In addition to the judgment that a word is foreign, another interesting aspect of the exegetical treatment of these words is the determination of the language to which a word belongs.

Most 20th-century surveys of Qurʼānic exegesis, whether produced in Muslim or non-Muslim academic environments, remain remarkably uniform. Several widely available texts demonstrate this symmetry, circumscribing the subject field of tafsīr within well-defined parameters. A few volumes can serve as representative examples. Ignaz Goldziher's Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung, first published in 1920, has held its place as the standard Western survey of Islamic scriptural exegesis. In 1381/1961, Muhammad Husayn al-Dhahabī published his al-Tafsīr wa-l-mufassirūn (“Commentary and Commentators”), a work that quickly became the standard secondary source for contemporary tafsīr studies throughout the Muslim world. Does the exegetical activity to be found in other forms of Islamic literature simply echo that of the musalsal commentary traditionTafsīr as a genre and tafsīr as an intellectual exercise of the Muslim religious imagination are not necessarily coterminous categories? Despite the countless shelves of published commentaries and the many collections of tafsīr manuscripts that await editing, medieval exegesis of the Qurʼān cannot be caught and contained within these boundaries.