2 - Sufi Qurʾan Commentaries: The Rise of a Genre

Summary

Introduction

This chapter discusses the five main sources used in this study, and what their compositions and exegetical methods teach us about the development of Sufi tafsīr in the period under scrutiny. We will elaborate on some of the issues raised in Chapter 1 concerning what we understand to be a ‘Sufi’ commentary, what might be considered the ‘Sufi’ exegetical method and how these Sufi commentaries relate to general developments in the history of tafsīr until the seventh/thirteenth century. The authors are placed into their broader circles of influence and historical context. As explained in Chapter 1, to understand how Sufi ideas were constructed, one has to look at the full network of relations in the personal, linguistic, religious, social and political spheres.

The period we are dealing with in this study is what Marshall Hodgson defined as the ‘Islamic Earlier Middle Period’ (950–1250 CE). All of the authors in this study – al-Sulamī, al-Qushayrī, Maybudī, al-Daylamī and Rūzbihān – fall within this period. They lived, studied, authored and taught in the major Persian centres of learning: Nishapur, Yazd, Herat, Shiraz and Hamadan. These cities were under Saljūq rule for the larger part of the Islamic Earlier Middle Period. This period is characterised by the ‘transformation of Muslim society’. It saw the restoration of a Jamāʿī-Sunnī political order in the Islamic world and the further institutionalisation of both Islamic learning in the form of madrasahs and Sufism in the form of khānaqāhs. Sufism in this period found a firmly established place within Islamic society and produced some prominent figures, besides the authors of our present study, such as Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī (d. 430/1038), the famous al-Ghazālī brothers Abū Ḥāmid (d. 505/1111) and Aḥmad (d. 520/1126), and ʿAyn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadhānī (d. 525/1131). It was also the period in which the genre of Sufi commentaries on the Qurʾan became well established, with several commentaries being written that were quite diverse in style and content. To properly contextualise the rise of the genre of Sufi Qurʾan commentaries, we must first have a closer look at the rise of this genre in Nishapur, where al-Sulamī and al-Qushayrī lived and taught, and then move on to the other authors and their historical contexts.