Tropology and Inimitability: Ibn ʿĀshūr's Theory of tafsīr in the Ten Prolegomena to al-Taḥrīr wa'l-tanwīr. Issue 1 (February 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Haddad, Gibril Fouad
• Is Part Of: Journal of Qur'anic studies. Volume 21:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 50
• Page End: 111
• Publication Date: 2019-02
• Subjects: Koran (Qur'an) -- Rhetoric -- Hermeneutics -- Stylistics -- Exegesis -- Ibn Ashur -- al-Tahrir wa'l-tanwir; 297.1226
• DOI: 10.3366/jqs.2019.0368
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1465-3591

Abstract

Abstract : To date, over 50 master's and doctoral dissertations in the universities of the Arab world have been devoted to the thirty-volume al-Taḥrīr wa'l-tanwīr by the Tunisian Qāḍī and Rector of Zaytūna, Muḥammad al-Ṭāhir b. ʿĀshūr (d. 1973), one of the most influential and encyclopædic authors of his generation. There are only a handful of published book-length works in Arabic on the Taḥrīr and and none in English, while translations of works of Qur'anic hermeneutics into English in general can be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the first 125 pages of his taḥrīr Ibn ʿĀshūr presents his approach in the form of a modern mufassir 's manual with a preamble and ten prolegomena. This paper sums up the contents of this important contemporary treatise and situates it as a proposed rediscovery of Qur'anic inimitability and a curriculum for exegetes identifying the disciplines needed to study the Qur'an, beginning with rhetoric and tropology.