Jami' al-Bayan (Tafsir al-Tabari)

Ibn Jarir al-Tabari's tafsir, Jami' al-Bayan 'an Ta'wil Ay al-Qur'an, runs to thirty volumes; Abu Hamid al-Isfarayini said of it that a man travelling to China to obtain it would not have gone too far, and Goldziher called it a rich encyclopaedia of tradition-based exegesis ¹.

Al-Tabari arranges his commentary verse by verse, building it on reports transmitted from accredited scholars alone and supporting them with variant isnads, applying to the transmitters the hadith critics' jarh and ta'dil — so that when a report proves untrustworthy he says so plainly, taking a frank, independent stance even toward the opinions of Ibn Abbas ¹. He attends to the plain meaning that cannot be abandoned, and where the text calls for another explanation he returns to the words of the salaf — Companions, Followers and the scholars of the community — while also drawing on the lore handed down from the People of the Book through figures like Ka'b al-Ahbar and Wahb ibn Munabbih ¹. He is counted the first commentator to make systematic use of ancient poetry, and his tafsir carries extensive linguistic and grammatical discussion, including some of the earliest documentation of the Basran-Kufan grammatical controversy ². For all this, Goldziher concludes, the great tafsir of al-Tabari is the heart of tradition-based exegesis and the summit that school reached ².

• Text from Hasan Ibrahim Hasan's Tarikh al-Islam (harvest copy BBib-Alex-05592), pp. 351-352; the book's bibliography entry at p. 494. The author notes that al-Tabari provoked the hostility of some Hanbalis and Sunnis who accused him of leaning toward views the salaf treated warily — a contemporary controversy around the author, not a judgement on the book.