Forbidding the reading of the Kashshāf: clarifying the Mamluk era reception of Zamakhsharī’s Qurʾān commentary

Abstract

The Qurʾān commentary of Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), his Kashshāf, gained wide acclaim shortly after being written, and was widely used in research and teaching throughout the Islamic world. This favourable reception was largely due to its new rhetorical insights on how ideas are articulated in the Qurʾān through specific linguistic constructions. The work was also critiqued for its Muʿtazilī content, the work viewed with suspicion for championing – surreptitiously at that – the heterodox interpretations of that theological school. Appraisal and critique formed much of the basis for scholarly engagement with this work in the form of teaching and commentary writing, especially the form of supercommentary writing (ḥawāshī) the Kashshāf initiated. That Mamluk scholarly culture had an overly negative response to the Kashshāf for theological reasons has been vastly overstated in recent scholarship, possibly due to a tendency to view theology as a sufficient impetus driving past intellectual activity. This general portrayal derives from specific Mamluk scholars being depicted as warning against the book, forbidding its study, calling for it to be banned, and undermining or disparaging others for supporting it. This negative reception has also served to justify the transition in the Islamic world to the tafsīr of Bayḍāwī, a work which largely excised the Muʿtazilism of the Kashshāf. This article reconsiders the evidence for an overall negative Mamluk era reception of the Kashshāf, with specific reference to the activities of those scholars whose depiction contributes to an inaccurate portrayal of a crucial moment in tafsīr history, both for the activities of Mamluk era scholars themselves, as well as the subsequent shift to the use of Bayḍāwī.

1. Introduction

God’s neighbour, as Abū-l-Qāsim, Maḥmūd b. ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144) would come to be known, wrote what was easily one of the most popular of Qurʾān commentaries in Islamic history, his al-Kashshāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl wa ʿuyūn al-aqāwīl fī wujūh al-taʾwīl (The Unveiler of the Realities of Revelation and Selected Opinions on Aspects of Interpretation). This work would be taught in formal and informal pedagogical settings and used in research throughout the Islamic world. It would also generate a new type of scholarly production, a tradition of super-commentary (ḥāshiya; ḥawāshī) writing. It would further give rise to another Qurʾān commentary, Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Bayḍāwī’s (d. 719/1319) Anwār al-tanzīl (Lights of Revelation), a work that would also be serviced in the form of its own tradition of ḥāshiya writing. This set of ḥawāshī would also be taught, studied, and used in the production of further Qurʾān commentaries across the Islamic world, to the present day. A significant reason for the outsized impact of Zamakhsharī’s Kashshāf on the trajectory of Islamic scholarly production had to do with two aspects related to its content. It was the first work to integrate linguistic concerns, specifically from the still developing field of balāgha through the works of ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078), into Qurʾān commentary. A focus on the communicative import of the Qurʾān and the way it articulated itself earned the Kashshāf wide scholarly acclaim, and gave rise to a new type of discourse in the field. The Kashshāf was also controversial for its content. The author was a staunch Muʿtazilī, and was often quite harsh in his attacks on fellow Sunnis who did not adhere to his theological school. How his Muʿtazilism was reflected in his work, especially in a way that was implicit, was a major concern of the later super-commentary tradition. The Kashshāf was thus, in terms of its reception in scholarly culture, in a curious place. It heralded a new type of focus on the language of the Qurʾān and was thus widely championed, but it was simultaneously a work that was at odds theologically with, and a sharp critic of, the very scholarly community that had largely embraced it.

It is sometimes assumed that the divergent theological positioning of the Kashshāf from the non-Muʿtazilī majority of the Sunni world had a determining effect on the reception of the work. Part of the reason for this assumption is the tendency to overstate the role of theology in Muslim societies and scholarly discourse. In the case of the Kashshāf, this did not exactly come to bear. Despite the curious place of the Kashshāf, the work was widely adopted, and rapidly at that. Its theological heterodoxy, so to speak, was dealt with through summaries and commentaries in the form of notes, glosses, and super-commentaries. It is not the case that the theological school of its author, or its heterodox theological opinions, were cause for the censure of the work by way of, for instance, banning it formally or in practice. By and large, it was seen as a legitimate scholarly enterprise to engage with the Kashshāf, not to censure its study or use.

The assumption I have described above, in that the work was subject to this form of censure for theological reasons, has nevertheless persisted, and has coloured how some scholars have depicted the Mamluk reception of the Kashshāf. Specifically, many Mamluk era scholars have been read as warning against, forbidding, or calling for the banning of the study of the Kashshāf. Others have been read as reacting to contemporaries poorly on account of their championing of the book. In this study, I push back on the accuracy of these depictions, and argue that foregrounding the importance of theology in our understanding of past Muslim societies had led to a misrepresentation of how a heterodox work like the Kashshāf was received. The purpose of this paper is not to argue that there were no theological concerns with the Kashshāf, nor to argue that there was no scholar, Mamluk or otherwise, who disapproved of the study of the Kashshāf and/or would much rather that others did not read it. It is certainly the case that both of those scenarios did occur, as I will show below. Instead, the purpose of this paper is to recalibrate our understanding of Mamluk era scholarly concerns, especially the over-exaggerated role that is often accorded to theology in determining the reception of a given idea or work in Islamic scholarly circles. I do this by showing that for the vast majority of scholars to whom this type of positioning is attributed – not to mention Mamluk scholarly society as a whole – this was certainly not the case.

There are many scholars who have been implicated in this negative reception in some way. They include scholars such as Ibn Abī Jamra (d. 695/1296), Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī (d. 704/1304), Abū Ḥayyān al-Gharnāṭī (d. 745/1344), Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348), Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 756/1355), al-Samīn al-Ḥalabī (d. 756/1355), Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449), Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480), and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505). This constitutes an impressive list of noteworthy Mamluk era scholars. Even though the actual charges against them, which I detail below, are varied in nature, they are similar in kind, in that their activities have been viewed as somehow anti-Kashshāf; or, alternatively, that they were impugned because they were not sufficiently anti-Kashshāf. Because of the pervasiveness of this type of depiction in secondary scholarly literature, and the prominent nature of the Mamluk scholars involved, cumulatively one is left with the impression that Mamluk society had a strong current of anti-Kashshāf sentiment. This is, however, simply not the case. Tracing the reception of the Kashshāf and the literature it left in its wake is a large project, which has only recently begun. The contribution of this paper is to rectify this aspect of that larger story. This has consequences, as I will show at the end of this paper, for explaining the replacement that would occur in Islamic scholarly culture of the Kashshāf by Bayḍāwī’s Anwār.

2. Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī’s warning against the Kashshāf

It is possible that the idea that some Mamluk era scholars were anti-Kashshāf goes back to Andrew Lane. Lane was the first to write a book on Zamakhsharī and the Kashshāf in the languages of western scholarship. This book, as well as a chapter and an article were important for filling in many of the important details that were missing on someone who, despite his importance to the field, had gone (and remains) relatively unstudied in western academia. In this regard, the criticisms below are not meant to detract from the fact that Lane’s work did a remarkably extensive amount of difficult lifting in primary sources and biographical material, and remains foundational for further Zamakhsharī studies.

In Lane’s works, two scholars, Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) and Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449) are used as foils to indicate opposition in Muslim orthodox scholarly culture to the Kashshāf, so I will begin this study by assessing these two cases. The Damascene hadith scholar and historian Dhahabī, speaking of Zamakhsharī, is portrayed by Lane as warning people to “be wary of his Kashshāf.” Lane uses this warning to show that there was opposition to the work specifically on account of its Muʿtazilī content. It is true that Dhahabī writes in his Mīzān al-iʿtidāl fī naqd al-rijāl (Just Balance in Critiquing Men), “be on guard against his Kashshāf (fa-kun ḥadhiran min Kashshāfihi).” His statement, however, requires some qualification, which complicates an understanding of him being opposed to the Kashshāf. The main reason for some circumspection in drawing too general a conclusion from his statement has to do with the genre of his Mīzān. This work of Dhahabī is meant to be critical; the genre the work falls within, al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl (impugning and certifying), is primarily to critique the reliability of transmitters of hadith using various markers of accreditation. Advocating what are considered heretical beliefs – which Zamakhsharī certainly does, from the perspective of a traditionist like Dhahabī, or any Sunni scholar at the time for that matter – is due cause for criticism in this type of literature. This is likely what Dhahabī is criticizing him for in the short entry for Zamakhsharī; most entries in this work are similarly cursory, as they are wont to be in works of this genre. The entirety of the entry is: “Maḥmūd b. ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī, exegete, grammarian. Righteous, but called towards Muʿtazilism – may God protect us – so be on guard against his Kashshāf.” Even if it is technically true to say that he warned people against the Kashshāf, this entry is hardly a stinging rebuke of the work, and does not constitute a call to not read the work. Instead, the phrasing found here, of calling towards something considered unorthodox, is specific to this genre of transmitter criticism, in which promoting unorthodox belief is different from and worse than simply holding them. A person who advocates said beliefs is thought to be more prone to either fabricate narrations, or more susceptible to passing along material that support their pre-existing theological commitments. It is in this context that Dhahabī is assessing Zamakhsharī and his Kashshāf. It is also worth noting in this regard that Zamakhsharī’s Kashshāf, apart from anything to do with Muʿtazilism, made use of narrations of suspect origins, or those which hadith scholars considered outright forgeries, usually in the context of various virtues attributed to a given sūrah or portion of the Qurʾān. That the Kashshāf made use of narrations considered spurious would also serve as sufficient cause for criticism the work would receive in later scholarship. The same could be said for Bayḍāwī’s Anwār, which followed the Kashshāf in the use of narrations of questionable authenticity related to the virtues of the Qurʾān. The use of such narrations constitutes another hadith-related reason for Dhahabī to criticize the work.

While there is indeed some warning here in the Mīzān, it likely does not mean anything beyond what I have outlined above. Even were it to be granted that the Mīzān was critical in a way that is above the nature of its genre, it would still be unclear that this constituted a reasonable summary of Dhahabī’s overall view of Zamakhsharī and his work. Dhahabī’s much longer entry for Zamakhsharī in his Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ (Biographies of Notable Figures) – a work that is not in the hadith genre – is not very critical. Dhahabī also ends his entry in this work with, “He used to advocate Muʿtazilism, God pardon him.” However, he also lists a number of favourable things about Zamakhsharī, noting for example that he was a leading figure in linguistic and rhetorical sciences, and listing the accounts of previous scholars praising him. The same can be said for Dhahabī’s al-ʿIbar fī khabar man ghabar (Lessons from Accounts of those Passed), also a work of biography, in which he says in the same breath that Zamakhsharī “was a promoter of Muʿtazilism, of numerous virtues,” which is hardly stinging criticism. In his Tārīkh al-Islām wa wafayāt al-mashāhīr wa-l-aʾlām (History of Islam and Death Accounts of Famous and Notable People), again a work of biography, his relatively long entry for Zamakhsharī is similarly generally one of praise, and does not betray overt condemnation against him or his tafsīr, even though he does end the entry with a curt, “He used to promote Muʿtazilism and bidʿa.”

It certainly would not be surprising if Dhahabī were to hold strong feelings about the Kashshāf or its author. He was a Shāfiʿī traditionist and fairly conservative in many of his views and approach to Islamic sciences, even criticizing Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328), with whom he had a tendentious relationship, for dabbling in sciences he considered foreign to core Islamic sciences. On the subject of tafsīr specifically, Dhahabī also criticized his fellow teachers in Damascus for flipping through Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s tafsīr in preparation for their lectures on the subject. That work, in his view, contained extraneous and even harmful material. Dhahabī preferred a method of tafsīr teaching that was uncluttered by the accretion of other sciences into it. This calls to mind, in some sense, the more famous attempt of his teacher Ibn Taymiyyah to revamp tafsīr in his Muqaddima. Dhahabī complains that,

There is hardly anyone who gives tafsīr its due today. Instead, instructors peruse Rāzī’s tafsīr, which is full of problematizing and doubt raising that really ought not to be listened to, since it is all just confused, obstinate, and back and forth argumentation, none of which serves to satisfy the reader one bit – we ask God for mercy! The opinions of the early scholars are easy to listen to, but they are often more than three or four, and so the truth ends up getting lost in the midst of them – the truth cannot attain from two different perspectives at the same time – although it is possible for an expression to have two meanings.

This reflection from Dhahabī shows the kind of vision he had for how tafsīr ought to be taught and practiced. His statement is also noteworthy for providing internal evidence that scholars were using Rāzī’s tafsīr as a teaching tool in the preparation of lessons in Damascus; the work may have been used as the basis for tafsīr lectures by itself, or used as a supplementary tool in the teaching of other texts that had by then gained renown as base teaching texts, such as Baghawī’s Maʿālim al-tanzīl (Signposts of Revelation) or Zamakhsharī’s Kashshāf. In light of this kind of opinion, it would not be altogether surprising if Dhahabī had a negative opinion of the Kashshāf, even if that work does not contain the level and type of problematizing found in Rāzī’s tafsīr. This, however, is speculation, because Dhahabī does not say so. Ultimately, the warning discussed above, especially when viewed in light of the genre of literature in which it is found, cannot constitute strong evidence for a negative reception of the Kashshāf. It certainly would not be an attitude representative of the larger reception of the work. Lane himself acknowledges this; out of a list he had consulted of nearly three dozen biographical entries spanning seven centuries, he did not find any of them critical of the Kashshāf, other than Dhahabī and Ibn Ḥajar. It is to the latter that I now turn.

3. On Ibn Ḥajar repeating Dhahabī’s warning

Anti-Kashshāf sentiments have been attributed to Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449), another major Mamluk era scholar, in two ways. One has been in assessing Ibn Ḥajar’s own directives regarding the Kashshāf; another has been through the claim that he appeared to impugn others because of their involvement with that work. I aim to show through the following sections that the attributions of this sentiment to him is not only ill-founded, but that the opposite is likely true.

The first attribution has to do with Ibn Ḥajar in connection to Dhahabī. The former, Lane has argued, repeated the same warning as Dhahabī about the Kashshāf as detailed above, and “practically tells his readers not to touch the book.” Lane further alleged that Ibn Ḥajar said that “the Kashshāf was off limits to all who wished to study it unless they were aware of its dangers,” and that he “forbad people to touch the Kashshāf.” These claims are due for reconsideration. It is certainly true that Ibn Ḥajar repeats Dhahabī’s warning. However, this is not noteworthy. Ibn Ḥajar’s work, his Lisān al-Mīzān (The Tongue of the Balance) uses Dhahabī’s Mīzān as its base. Ibn Ḥajar’s stated aim for his own work, which he articulated in his introduction, is to remove some of the material from the Mīzān and add some other material that could not be found in another contemporaneous work, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Mizzī’s (d. 742/1341) Tahdhīb al-Kamāl fī asmā al-rijāl (Refining the Complete Book of the Names of Men). That Ibn Ḥajar would include material from the Mīzān is thus hardly significant – it is in fact entirely expected – and does not by itself tell us anything about Ibn Ḥajar’s opinion of Zamakhsharī’s Kashshāf. The citation of Dhahabī’s entry for Zamakhsharī in Ibn Ḥajar’s Lisān is also clearly demarcated by the intahā end quote abbreviation, which is to say that it is clear that Ibn Ḥajar is quoting Dhahabī at the beginning of his entry on Zamakhsharī, not necessarily giving his own opinion. Other evidence is required to ascertain his own opinion.

4. Ibn Abī Jamra’s opposition to the Kashshāf

What is interesting about Ibn Ḥajar’s entry on Zamakhsharī, and what could constitute this other evidence, is that he includes in it a summary of a harsh assessment of the Kashshāf by Ibn Abī Jamra (d. 695/1296). Ibn Abī Jamra was an Andalusian then Cairene ascetic hadith scholar known for both his abridgement of the hadith collection of Bukhārī and his Bahjat al-nufūs (Splendour of the Soul). The latter was an extended commentary on his selections from Bukhārī, with a decidedly pietistic focus. Ibn Abī Jamra served as a major source for Ibn Ḥajar’s Fatḥ al-bārī (Inspiration of the Creator), his own commentary on Bukhārī’s hadith collection. This familiarity may be the reason why Ibn Ḥajar uses him here, even though Ibn Abī Jamra is not known as a tafsīr scholar. Lane had been aware that Ibn Ḥajar makes use of Ibn Abī Jamra in this entry, but did not explain the cited argument. However, he did conclude that,

Through his source, Ibn Ḥajar says basically that the Kashshāf is off limits to all who wish to study it, whether such a student is cognizant of the author’s intrigues (ʿārif bi-dasāʾisihi) or not. A little later, after commenting on a number of al-Zamakhsharī’s other works, Ibn Ḥajar returns to the Kashshāf but this time he seems to allow some leeway, saying that those who have their feet planted firmly in the Sunna and who are aware of the Kashshāf’s dangers may study it.

This is an inaccurate depiction of what is happening in the Lisān, one of a handful of inaccurate depictions of Ibn Ḥajar’s relationship with the Kashshāf. In part because of Ibn Ḥajar’s outsized importance in Mamluk era scholarship, this is an important piece of evidence that appears to support the notion of widespread discontent with the work in that period. It is thus in need of clarification.

Ibn Ḥajar summarized in this work Ibn Abī Jamra’s complaint in his Bahjat about the Kashshāf. Ibn Abī Jamra had found it blameworthy that some scholars thought it permissible to peruse the Kashshāf, even preferring it to Ibn ʿAṭiyya’s (d. 542/1148) al-Muḥarrar al-wajīz fī tafsīr al-Kitāb al-ʿazīz (Accurate and Concise Exegesis of the Noble Book), a work he thought was superior and safer. The two contemporaneous tafsīr works, written in the east and west of the Islamic world, respectively, have had a long history of being compared to each other. The latter has long been considered in some circles, as it is by Ibn Abī Jamra, a safe Sunni alternative to Zamakhsharī’s Muʿtazilī Kashshāf. Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328) would make a similar comparison in his Muqaddima, a prolegomena of sorts to tafsīr, as well as in a fatwa related to tafsīr. Abū Ḥayyān (d. 745/1344) would do the same in his tafsīr. Much later, this comparison would be expanded upon by Muḥammad al-Fāḍil b. ʿĀshūr in his al-Tafsīr wa rijāluhu (Qurʾān Commentary and its Men). It is probably no mere coincidence that the comparison has mostly been promoted by Mālikīs from North Africa and Spain, Ibn ʿAṭiyya being a Mālikī from Granada. Possibly the oddest effect of this long-standing comparison came through Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 974/1567), the Shāfiʿī jurist, citing Ibn ʿArafa (d. 803/1400), the Tunisian Mālikī scholar. Ibn ʿArafa had apparently turned the argument made above on its head: because Ibn ʿAṭiyya was known to be the safe Sunni alternative, his work’s hidden Muʿtazilism was even more dangerous to the novice than the Muʿtazilism in the Kashshāf. The hidden Muʿtazilism of the latter had by then become well known, such that people were already on guard against it, and it had already led to numerous refutations. On the other hand, Ibn ʿAṭiyya was a well known Sunni, and the Muʿtazilī interpretations he approvingly included in his tafsīr without pointing out their theological bent would be thought by the unaware reader to be an acceptable Sunni interpretation.

Ibn Abī Jamra did not argue as Ibn ʿArafa does; to him, preferring the Kashshāf to Ibn ʿAṭiyya has more obviously negative consequences. A reader of the Kashshāf, he argued, can either be aware of its surreptitious Muʿtazilī insinuations or not. If one is aware of them, it would be impermissible for him to read it because he could not be sure that he would always remain alert to these implications; these hidden insinuations could then seep into his own thinking without him realizing it. Moreover, he might cause other people who are themselves uneducated to read it because he aggrandizes the work. More still, such a person would be giving priority to the Kashshāf when there are superior options to it available. A scholar, he reasons, should desist from being the cause for the infiltration of Muʿtazilī thought. He cites in support of this latter argument that the Prophet, peace and blessings of God be upon him, said, “Do not call a hypocrite master, for that angers God.” The alternative, Ibn Abī Jamra goes on to argue, is that a person is not aware of these insinuations. In such a case, it would also be impermissible to read the Kashshāf, as these insinuated meanings would become part of his own thought without him knowing it, such that he would also end up a Muʿtazilī (and a murjiʿī too, for good measure). Thus ends Ibn Ḥajar’s summary of Ibn Abī Jamra’s position. The latter’s longer argument, which is far more cogent than Ibn Ḥajar’s summary, is derived from a section in his Bahjat in which he blames contemporary scholars for a variety of ills, the reliance on the Kashshāf being but one of them.

There is a certain allure to the simple logic of Ibn Abī Jamra’s airtight reasoning; it takes all possibilities into account, yet leads to the same conclusion that studying the work is prohibited. Despite its allure, however, this form of reasoning gained no currency in the history of the exegetical tradition; Ibn Abī Jamra’s approach was not representative of the general trend in tafsīr scholarship. By the time of Ibn Abī Jamra, scholars had already eagerly taken up the Kashshāf, as evidenced by Ibn Abī Jamra’s unsuccessful attempt to stem the tide. The use of the Kashshāf as a major text of tafsīr and other disciplines of Islamic scholarship would continue until the modern period. If there were any scholars who considered Ibn Abī Jamra’s type of reasoning authoritative, history has not recorded much information about them. On the assumption that there were scholars like Ibn Abī Jamra, that is, of the opinion that it was impermissible or better to not read the Kashshāf, they may, like him, have had a combination of pietistic and theoretical concerns in mind. It is, on this note, unclear to me if Ibn Abī Jamra, who was not a tafsīr scholar, was even familiar with the Kashshāf. He protests scholars who read “the book of al-Zamakhsharī,” and “call it the Kashshāf to aggrandize and promote it.” This may be rhetorical on his part, but it remains an odd protest, for it does not evince any familiarity with the work; that was the author’s chosen title for the book, not something later scholars came up with.

Ibn Abī Jamra’s line of reasoning was not taken up by Ibn Ḥajar, as has been argued by Lane. Rather, the opposite occurred: it was cited so that it could be explicitly rejected. After Ibn Ḥajar gave the summary above, he went on to discuss Zamakhsharī’s participation in other disciplines. He eventually returned to tafsīr, and wrote,

With respect to his exegesis, people have fallen in love with it, have read it closely, and clarified its Muʿtazilī insinuations, even writing monographs on this topic. Anyone whose feet are well grounded in the Prophetic way, and knows enough about various scholarly opinions, would benefit from his tafsīr, and would remain unharmed by whatever is to be feared of its Muʿtazilī insinuations.

It is, according to Ibn Ḥajar, permissible for some to read and benefit from the Kashshāf. This, in essence, is a rejection of his summarized version of Ibn Abī Jamra’s position. Moreover, for our purposes, this is precisely the opposite of what has been claimed. It is not the case that Ibn Ḥajar “practically tells his readers not to touch the book.” He also had not “forbad people to touch the Kashshāf,” nor had he indicated that “the Kashshāf was off limits to all who wished to study it unless they were aware of its dangers,” The latter description is formulated in such a way as to effectively portray Ibn Ḥajar as advocating a default prohibition (x is prohibited unless y entails), which implies a negative positioning towards the Kashshāf. On the contrary, Ibn Ḥajar’s choice of phrase is in fact formulated to express wide approval for the use of the work.

5. On hidden Muʿtazilism, and the term Dasāʾis

That Ibn Ḥajar is responding to Ibn Abī Jamra, or anyone else who might argue against using the Kashshāf, is perhaps even clearer in Arabic, mostly because of the repetition of the term dasāʾis, which I have translated above as (Muʿtazilī) insinuations. There is a long history of scholars using this term to point out or complain, with varying degrees of credibility, about the hidden Muʿtazilī insinuations of the Kashshāf. The use of this term and the scholarship surrounding it deserves further study, but suffice it to note that it has been used frequently by Ibn al-Munayyir (d. 683/1284), who wrote the first series of notes on the Kashshāf, many of them critical about the work’s Muʿtazilism. It was also used often by Abū Ḥayyān (d. 745/1344) to criticize things that irked him about the work. The general idea that there was hidden Muʿtazilism in the work that needed some effort to extract, even if the word dasāʾis was not explicitly used, was perhaps most famously articulated by Sirāj al-Dīn al-Bulqīnī (d. 805/1403). Bulqīnī was the famous Shāfiʿī legal authority and judge of Cairo. He had studied grammar with Abū Ḥayyān, and wrote a partial ḥāshiya on the Kashshāf called al-Kashshāf ʿalā-l-Kashshāf (Unveiling the Kashshāf). He was cited by Jalāl al-Dīn al-Ṣuyūṭī (d. 911/1505) in his al-Itqān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān (Proficiency in Qurʾānic Disciplines) as saying, “I extracted Muʿtazilism from the Kashshāf with a tweezer, at the place where Zamakhsharī said regarding the verse Whoever is saved from the Fire and admitted into Paradise has surely triumphed (Qurʾān Āl-Imrān 3:185), “And what triumph can be greater than admittance to Paradise?” He meant to indicate that one would not see God.” The possibility of seeing God in Paradise was a strong point of contention between Sunnis and Muʿtazilīs, the former holding that this vision was attested textually, the latter holding that such a vision was logically impossible, and its apparent textual evidence contradicted by other textual evidence affirming the impossibility of perceiving God through the senses. Bulqīnī was contending here that Zamakhsharī asking rhetorically what could be better than being admitted to paradise was not innocent; he was taking a surreptitious jab at the Sunni belief that seeing God in paradise was a greater reward.

Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328) also famously made a similar argument about the hidden insinuations of the Kashshāf. He complained that some Muʿtazilīs, like Zamakhsharī, were so eloquent they were able to covertly insert heresy like Muʿtazilism (yadussu al-bidaʿ) into their speech without others recognizing the sleight of hand. Ibn Taymiyyah groused that it has gotten to the point where Zamakhsharī’s statements had gained currency even among those who did not hold the same beliefs; he claims to have seen scholars, exegetes and others, who had mentioned in their books or in their talks bits of Zamakhsharī’s exegesis which corresponded to Muʿtazilī principles, yet had remained blissfully unaware of that. He similarly lamented, in a fatwa to a soldier asking about tafsīr and other matters, commonly appended to his Muqaddima, that Zamakhsharī had filled his book with Muʿtazilism’s five principles, articulating them in such a manner that most people remained oblivious to its carefully worded phrasing and intent.

For his part, Ibn Abī Jamra used the term dasāʾis multiple times as the crux of his argument above against the Kashshāf, since one could either be aware of the surreptitious manner in which Zamakhsharī attempted to craft his speech so as to hide its Muʿtazilī insinuations, or not. Ibn Ḥajar, in responding to this specific point about Muʿtazilī implications in the text, repeats the same term twice at the end of the same entry. He clarifies that scholars have already written whole books about these insinuations, and that one who knows enough should not be bothered by these insinuations. It is clear that Ibn Ḥajar is pushing back against Ibn Abī Jamra’s argument – and probably that of Dhahabī – not simply repeating it.

6. On Ibn Ḥajar, teaching Tafsīr, and the Kashshāf

The foregoing has been aimed at showing that a specific citation from Ibn Ḥajar’s Lisān has been misread in a way that makes it appear as though Ibn Ḥajar harboured anti-Kashshāf sentiment. There is a broader problem, even if one were to set aside the preceding arguments. This is that a general awareness of the trajectory of tafsīr in the medieval Islamic past would have made it inconceivable to initially find it plausible that Ibn Ḥajar could have ever wanted to forbid people from reading the Kashshāf, or in fact discouraged them from doing so. One does not need to engage in close readings of the Lisān to suspect that the claims about Ibn Ḥajar were obvious misinterpretations. By the time of Ibn Ḥajar, the Kashshāf had long become part and parcel of the apparatus of serious scholarship. The work was so significant that one could not engage in scholarly discussions without recourse to the work.

In the case of Ibn Ḥajar, he himself used the work when he taught tafsīr. His student, Shams al-Dīn al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497), has several interesting things to say about Ibn Ḥajar’s teaching of tafsīr in the biography he wrote of his teacher, al-Jawāhir wa-l-durar fī tarjamat Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Ḥajar (Gems and Pearls in the Biography of Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Ḥajar). Sakhāwī notes the mixed feelings Ibn Ḥajar used to have about his proficiency in tafsīr: on the one hand, he would express regret at not having recorded (or have anyone record for him) the innovative exegetical thoughts he had, which could not be found in any prior source; on the other, he would also articulate the shame he felt before God for speaking about his words using mere speculation. Another of Ibn Ḥajar’s students, Shams al-Dīn al-Jawjarī (d. 889/1484), would say something similar about his teacher’s teaching of tafsīr, which challenges the common myth that medieval Muslim exegesis was constrained to transmission and the repetition of the exegetical opinions of earlier authorities. Jawjarī said that “In his tafsīr classes, he would discuss finer points, ambiguities, and difficult words, the likes of which could not be found in other tafsīr works. Rather, he would formulate these issues himself, and would not waste his time with mentioning transmitted material from works of tafsīr, since such material could be easily sourced by anyone who reads those works.” Sakhāwī also happily points out that his teacher never partook in the arrogance of other scholars in engaging with prior sources. He would not bar himself from reading prior works on the pretense that it would interfere with his own creative thinking in tafsīr. At the same time, he would not come up with new ideas and then arrogantly say that other scholars, who preceded him, agreed with him, and that he only came across their writings after he had come up with the idea himself. He also would not arrogantly say things like, compare what I say to what al-Fakhr al-Rāzī says.

Sakhāwī writes that he saw Ibn Ḥajar’s rough notes for some verses he had discussed in his lessons; it contained selections from the works of a large number of exegetes, including Zamakhsharī. There are other pieces of evidence that demonstrate quite clearly that Ibn Ḥajar could not have had the type of negative attitude attributed to him with respect to the Kashshāf. His commentary on Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, his Fatḥ al-bārī, the work for which he is most renowned, and probably the most well-known book of hadith commentary in history, engages with the Kashshāf numerous times on linguistic and exegetical matters. Ibn Ḥajar himself also wrote a work that traced the hadith narrations cited in the Kashshāf. This was a book in service of the Kashshāf, not a book meant to deter readers from it. Sakhāwī also mentions in his biography, in a section on the special attention Ibn Ḥajar paid to his books, that he had made some corrections to a copy he had of the Kashshāf and its ḥāshiya by al-Taftāzānī (d. 793/1390). It is not conceivable that a major scholar who is well known for using the Kashshāf extensively in his most prominent work, made use of it in his teaching and research, and wrote a book in service of it, also thought that one should not use the same work.

The very scholarly and cultural milieu Ibn Ḥajar participated in was saturated with positive depictions of the Kashshāf, not in opposition to it. A poet and litterateur (and chessmaster), ʿĪsā b. Ḥajjāj al-ʿĀliya (d. 807/1405), wrote a poem praising Ibn Ḥajar, which he recited aloud to the recipient in the presence of one of the latter’s friends, the scholar Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Aqfahsī (d. 821/1418). In it, the poet praises Ibn Ḥajar for his prodigious skill in various sciences, comparing him favourably to past scholars considered paragons of the field. For tafsīr, he praises him by saying, The Remembrance, he explains it in a manner/like the one who penned the Kashshāf in Umm al-Qurā (wa-l-dhikr fassarahu ʿalā naḥw alladhī/qad allafa al-Kashshāf fī Umm al-Qurā). Slightly more obscure is the praise of Shaʿbān al-Āthārī (d. 828/1425), another poet and litterateur who participated in related fields like grammar and balāgha. In a long poem, he praised Ibn Ḥajar for, among other things, the eloquence of his speech, writing that his lectures are a Remover of anxiety, a key to the sciences/his shining words, a light and clarity (kashshāf karb wa miftāḥ al-ʿulūm wa fī/alfāẓihi al-ghurr miṣbāḥ wa tibyān). This verse contains a play on the titles of four works seen as foundational in the field of balāgha (the study of effective communication), including at its head the Kashshāf. Suffice it to say that a scholarly culture in which Ibn Ḥajar is praised through recourse to comparison with the Kashshāf cannot be the same one in which Ibn Ḥajar is supposedly warning against that same book.

7. The aftermath of the claims regarding Ibn Ḥajar

The claim that Ibn Ḥajar could have forbidden the study of the Kashshāf is not only an obvious misreading of Ibn Ḥajar’s Lisān; it is also inconceivable for a multitude of reasons, some of which I have outlined above. That this type of widely available evidence is unknown, and/or does not condition the type of judgments that are made about Islamic intellectual history, is reflective of a need for further scholarship to increase familiarity with the Islamic scholarship and its practitioners in that milieu.

At a specific level, a misunderstanding over Dhahabī, Ibn Ḥajar, and the Mamluk period in general, has facilitated the spread of these false claims in secondary scholarship. Some of the reviews of Lane’s book, for example, take for granted his portrayal of Ibn Ḥajar, even though I have argued that this portrayal should have been prima facie inconceivable. Suleiman Mourad, in his review, seems to accept, based on citations from Lane, that Ibn Ḥajar criticized the work for its Muʿtazilī contents – even though he did not – and mentions him in the same breath as the criticism the work received from Ibn al-Munayyir – even though the latter had a far more contentious relationship with the Kashshāf. More troubling is that Karen Bauer, in her review, speaks of the problem of the overall positive reception of the Kashshāf, “despite vehement attacks on it by influential Sunnites such as Ibn Taymīya and Ibn Ḥajar.” There is, as I have argued, no evidence that Ibn Ḥajar vehemently attacked the Kashshāf, and a great deal of widely available evidence to the contrary. The claim about Ibn Ḥajar is also repeated by Kifayat Ullah, whose Al-Kashshāf: Al-Zamakhsharī’s Muʿtazilite Exegesis of the Qurʾān was a useful rejoinder to Lane’s larger contention that the Kashshāf was not as Muʿtazilī as has been thought. Ibn Ḥajar is here again portrayed as taking a negative position and warning readers away from the book. The point here is not to blame these scholars, but only to highlight how misinformation can affect subsequent understanding of scholars in this period. Indeed, fact-checking already peer-reviewed work is an insurmountable task; subsequent scholarship can only realistically proceed under the assumption that primary sources are largely being represented accurately, or the field is led to a type of reproducibility crisis.

Far more significant than the examples cited above is the recent work of Walid Saleh. Saleh is the only scholar in the western academy to have worked in a sustained manner, through a series of articles, on charting out the history of the ḥāshiya in the tafsīr tradition. This body of work includes Marginalia and Peripheries: A Tunisian Historian and the History of Qurʾanic Exegesis, a 2011 article which sought in part to resituate the role of the ḥāshiya in the trajectory of the discipline of tafsīr. More integral to the present discussion was a 2013 article, The Gloss as Intellectual History: The Ḥāshiyahs on al-Kashshāf, the first academic attempt in the western world to detail the reception of the Kashshāf and its ḥawāshī in the Islamic world. The project of Saleh in mapping out the history of the ḥāshiya in general is ongoing. A 2021 article, The Qurʾan Commentary of al-Bayḍāwī: A History of Anwār al-tanzīl, is similarly an attempt to track the development of this form of scholarly writing in connection to a work that would largely replace the Kashshāf.

Saleh’s 2013 article on the reception history of the Kashshāf contained several pieces of incidental evidence that showed individual scholars taking negative positions to that work. Even though this evidence is incidental to the point of the reception history traced in that article, cumulatively, simply because of the sheer number of scholars implicated, the Mamluk period as a whole begins to appear as one in which there was widespread resentment against the work, or at least a strong undercurrent of it. I do not know if Lane’s assessment has led to this type of reading in Saleh’s work; it may be fairer to rest the blame not with Lane, but with the fact that knowledge of the Islamic scholarly culture in the Mamluk period, and specifically the practice of tafsīr, has only recently begun to receive sustained reflection. Whatever the case may be, I will assess below some of the claims that have been made related to this reception, in an attempt to clarify what are thought to be negative Mamluk attitudes towards the work. Responding to these claims specifically is necessary because of the centrality of Saleh’s work to further studies on the Kashshāf and its reception history. I will start where I left off, with Ibn Ḥajar.

8. Undermining the legacy of Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī because of the Kashshāf

That Ibn Ḥajar had a poor view of the Kashshāf is said to be reflected in a biographical entry he wrote in his al-Durar al-kāmina fī aʿyān al-miʾa al-thāmina (Concealed Pearls: Notables of the Eighth Century) for another scholar, ʿAlam al-Dīn Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī (d. 704/1304). An Alexandrian scholar, Ibn al-Munayyir (d. 683/1284), had written a work called al-Intiṣāf min al-Kashshāf (Demanding Justice from the Kashshāf). This work was a series of notes on Zamakhsharī’s tafsīr, much of which were highly critical of its Muʿtazilī content. Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī would write a ḥāshiya on the Kashshāf called al-Inṣāf: Mukhtaṣar al-intiṣāf min al-Kashshāf (The Rejoinder: Summary of Demanding Justice from the Kashshāf) a work that was largely a response to Ibn al-Munayyir’s criticisms. Because Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī wrote a work defending the Kashshāf, Saleh reads Ibn Ḥajar’s biographical entry on Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī as deliberately negative, “clearly meant to undermine his legacy and reputation” given that the latter had written this rejoinder, “defending the indefensible.” Saleh also writes that Ibn Ḥajar informs us that Abū Ḥayyān and others did not think much of Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī. The latter, Saleh argues, was presented by Ibn Ḥajar as “unrepentant and unperturbed” for the reproach he received for supporting the Kashshāf. There is, however, little reason to read Ibn Ḥajar’s entry as undermining Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī for the given reasons. This reading only makes sense when one starts from the presupposition that Ibn Ḥajar had taken a critical position towards the Kashshāf, such that he would extend this attitude towards those defending that work. As I have outlined above, Ibn Ḥajar did not do so; rather, there is substantial evidence to the contrary.

Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī was a well-known and respected scholar in Cairo. He gained wide repute as a capable and patient teacher. Because of his skill in pedagogy, Ibn Ḥajar reports, it seemed as though virtually everyone of renown in Egypt had studied with him (wa kāna lahu iqtidār ʿalā al-taʿlīm wa ṣabr ʿalā al-ṭalaba ḥattā inna muʿẓam man kāna bi-l-diyār al-miṣriyya mimman qaraʾa ʿalayhi wa maththala bayna yadayhi). There is not much reason to think that Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī’s Inṣāf work on the Kashshāf detracted from this standing. Ibn Ḥajar does point out that he was criticized for this (wa qad ʿūtiba ʿalā dhālika), but he does not say by whom, or how widespread the criticism was, or even what the criticism constituted of. It seems as though Ibn Ḥajar mentions this primarily to note that Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī pushed back on this criticism by saying that “My work is a refutation of a refutation!” (hādha al-kitāb radd li-radd). The mention is probably innocuous, rather than criticism of Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī. It is possible that its inclusion was a curiosity, or was meant to be an example of Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī’s wittiness, a characteristic Ibn Ḥajar mentions, and one that appears to be a common refrain in other biographical entries of the scholar.

What is somewhat troublesome is Ibn Ḥajar’s remark in his entry for Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī that Abū Ḥayyān (d. 745/1344), who was a student of the latter, attacked him in his tafsīr work al-Baḥr al-muhīṭ (The Encompassing Ocean). Ibn Ḥajar writes that “Abū Ḥayyān did not use to describe him as skilled; he took this up in his grand Tafsīr.” This statement is curious, and is what Saleh was referring to when he wrote that Abū Ḥayyān did not think much of Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī, which he thought Ibn Ḥajar included to undermine him because of his defense of the Kashshāf. Ibn Ḥajar appears to claim that this criticism of Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī can be found in Abū Ḥayyān’s Baḥr. However, I have been unable to source this alleged criticism there. On the contrary, Abū Ḥayyān appears to speak highly of Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī in that work. He notes in the introduction to his Baḥr, when listing the different perspectives that one can bring to tafsīr, that one of the scholars he studied uṣūl al-fiqh (jurisprudential theory) with was Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī, with whom he studied the latter’s summary of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s al-Maḥṣūl fī ʿilm uṣūl al-fiqh (The Essence of Jurisprudential Theory). Abū Ḥayyān also speaks of Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī respectfully on the two occasions I have found him referring to him, calling him “our teacher.” At these two places in the Baḥr, Abū Ḥayyān is assessing a grammatical point Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī made about one of the rare places in the Qurʾān where, contrary to its normal practice, it grammatically treats a word in a verse in accordance to its meaning first, and later in the same verse, according to its form. While Abū Ḥayyān eventually disagrees with Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī’s parsing of the verse, he does not criticize him, nor does he come close to describing him as being unskilled.

It is thus unclear to me what we should make of Ibn Ḥajar’s inclusion of this comment. The phrasing of this comment – wa kāna Abū Ḥayyān lā yaṣifuhu bi-l-mahāra – is awkward in Arabic, and the possibility remains that a scribal or printing error added the negative particle. Without it, the phrase would sound better, and would make more sense in the context of Ibn Ḥajar listing scholars who praised or benefited from him. It would also coincide with what we know overall of the relationship between the teacher and student, most of the information in biographical dictionaries about Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī coming through Abū Ḥayyān, recorded by Ṣafadī. Such a possibility can only be explored with recourse to original manuscripts, some of which, such as the copy of Sakhāwī, student of Ibn Ḥajar, have not been used in the two available editions (Cairo, India) we have today. I mention this possibility only because of the oddity of the comment and the fact that it cannot be sourced where Ibn Ḥajar says it is. It can nevertheless be set aside for the time being because it is speculative, and also because it accords with the attempted conclusions of this article.

On the assumption that the manuscripts and printed editions do fairly represent what Ibn Ḥajar meant to say here, and Abū Ḥayyān did criticize his teacher in that manner at an as of yet indeterminate location in this tafsīr, it would be unclear what motivated such criticism. Abū Ḥayyān had a tendentious relationship with Zamakhsharī, vacillating between admiration and unfair criticism. It is possible, although I think improbable, that Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī’s attempts to shore up the reputation of the Kashshāf, in his own refutation of Ibn al-Munayyir’s refutation, could have led to this attack by his student. A second possibility is that Abū Ḥayyān’s generally cantankerous nature led him to snidely demean the intellectual acumen of his teacher, meaning that if Ibn Ḥajar’s attribution is accurate, the criticism had nothing to do with the Kashshāf. That Abū Ḥayyān would attack others was not unknown. His student and long-time companion Kamāl al-Dīn al-Udfuwī (d. 748/1347) penned a relatively long entry for him in his al-Badr al-sāfir ʿan uns al-musāfir (Full Moon Shining: the Traveler’s Companion). This entry was noted by the biographer Ibn Qādī Shuhba (d. 851/1448) as reaching about a full quire in length. Udfuwī was clearly distraught at losing his friend, writing that “regret over his distance is relentless, worry over his loss ever-present. He also noted that Abū Ḥayyān “was beloved and gracious to me,” and that Abū Ḥayyān had licensed him, praised him in two qasīdas he had written for him, and had allowed Udfuwī to transmit some hadith and a book the latter had written to him. Udfuwī himself penned a few verses of praise for Abū Ḥayyān when the latter finished writing his Baḥr. Despite all of this, Udfuwī still points out the hostility with which Abū Ḥayyān treated others, writing that

He had a poor opinion of everyone else. If he heard something good about someone else, he would not seek to know more about it, but if it were bad, he would, and would overblow it to the point that he would attack even those whose presence he was in. He thus ended up attacking those who are otherwise considered praiseworthy by the entire world. Because of that, many people were exposed to quite a bit of hardship from him.

This assessment by Abū Ḥayyān’s friend may serve to clarify why he might attack someone, like Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī, he otherwise respected, and is probably good reason to not put too much stock in how Abū Ḥayyān potentially described him. These possibilities are, as I have mentioned, speculative: I have not found any corresponding evidence for what Ibn Ḥajar appears to attribute to Abū Ḥayyān.

The overall point with respect to Ibn Ḥajar is that given what we know of Ibn Ḥajar’s positive opinion of the Kashshāf, the evidence for which I have detailed above, and the high status Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī enjoyed within scholarly circles in eighth/fourteenth C Cairo, it is not reasonable to read Ibn Ḥajar as attempting to denigrate him because he defended Zamakhsharī or the Kashshāf. In fact, Ibn Ḥajar cites Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī as refuting a critique Ibn al-Munayyir leveled against Zamakhsharī. This occurs amidst a longer discussion in his Fatḥ about using superlatives, such as supreme judge, in official titles to describe people, titles sometimes argued to be more worthy as exclusive descriptors for God. While Ibn Ḥajar does come down in favour of the permissibility of using such titles, that Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī might support Zamakhsharī’s opposing position was cited as a matter of course in Mamluk era literature, and not seen as blameworthy behaviour; both Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī and Zamakhsharī were respected authorities.

A broader problem about the use of biographical literature in constructing intellectual history is that even if the comment Ibn Ḥajar makes about Abū Ḥayyān is accurate, what we have before us is only a presentation of information in Ibn Ḥajar’s Durar (‘Abū Ḥayyān thought poorly of Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī’). Imputing to it nefarious intent (‘Ibn Ḥajar is presenting this information to undermine Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī because of the latter’s defense of the Kashshāf’) is only credible because of an assumed background, namely one of general hostility in the Mamluk scholarly milieu towards Zamakhsharī’s work, a position ostensibly shared by Ibn Ḥajar. This assumed background is clearly a misrepresentation. Such a scenario shows how assumptions can interfere with how tabaqāt style works are interpreted. Their presentation of information, which requires interpretation and some speculation to make sense of them, needs to be measured against other available evidence. In this specific case, it can affect how we read relationships between scholars like Ibn Ḥajar, Abū Ḥayyān, and Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī.

9. On Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʾī wanting the Kashshāf banned

Presumptions about the negative reception of Zamakhsharī’s Kashshāf in Mamluk scholarly circles colour how Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480) has been read as well. Biqāʿī was a student of Ibn Ḥajar, and was active in various fields, including history, poetry and tafsīr. He wrote a large tafsīr work, Naẓm al-durar fī tanāsub al-āyāt wa-l-suwar (Strung Pearls: The Interconnectedness of Verses and Chapters). This work became subject to intense controversy in Biqāʿī’s milieu, his rivals attacking his work under the guise of taking offense to its use of Biblical parallels to explain the Qurʾān. Saleh was the first to write extensively about Biqāʿī for a western audience in a series of articles and chapters, and also edited a long treatise Biqāʿī wrote in defense of his tafsīr.

In the latter work, Biqāʿī expressed some bafflement that good Sunni scholars were attacking his tafsīr instead of paying attention to problematic works like the Kashshāf. Saleh, in a 2013 article, appears to take Biqāʿī at his word that his enemies should see to it that Zamakhsharī’s work is ostracized and banned, not his. This claim would be repeated in a 2022 article, where Saleh writes that

… what is not widely known about al-Biqāʿī is that he made attacking al-Kashshāf a cornerstone of his polemics against his enemies, accusing his Sunni opponents of being dupes, or worse spineless preachers who kept their mouth shut about the widespread availability of such a heretical work: at best, they were reading heretical works unwittingly. Accused by some of his opponents that his own Qurʾān commentary was heretical, al-Biqāʿī counter-accused them of reading what was a non-Sunni work, al-Kashshāf, and of being in no position to issue judgement on him.

A more accurate depiction of Biqāʿī and his positionality vis a vis the Kashshāf is possible. The above depiction relies, as I have argued above, on an understanding that scholars like Biqāʿī held a negative stance towards that work. This, however, was not the case. Biqāʿī’s remonstrations here were performative; he was only complaining that if scholars wanted to fixate on a work they considered problematic, they should a fortiori have directed their attentions towards Zamakhsharī, a work known to contain non-orthodox theological content. Their lack of focus on that work shows that their professed interest in policing problematic literature is not genuine, and probably has another, personal, motive. As he puts it,

… it is known with certainty that the entire disagreement over it [Biqāʿī’s tafsīr] – while being silent over the Kashshāf (and other named books) even with what they contain of content that is well known, that which casts aside the beliefs of Sunnis, and are openly sold in the book markets without any opposition – is purely arbitrary and self motivated (… yuʿlam qaṭʿan anna muṭlaq al-nizāʿ fīhi maʿa al-sukūt ʿan al-Kashshāf … maʿa mā fīhā mimmā huwa maʿlum al-munābidha li-ʿaqāʾid ahl al-sunna wa hiya mimmā yujāhar bi-bayʿihi fī-l-aswāq min ghayri nakīr mujarrad hawā wa haẓẓ nafs).

Arguments following this structure and aimed at highlighting an opponent’s inconsistency do not demand of the opponent that they extend their behaviour under criticism. In this case, Biqāʿī does not actually want anyone to ban Zamakhsharī’s work. He is only arguing that the lack of attention paid by his rivals to the Kashshāf (and other problematic works), even though it is widely available, is good reason to think that their focus on his tafsīr has ulterior motives.

Moreover, by Biqāʿī’s time, the Kashshāf had long been a fixture in scholarly discussions, which applies to Biqāʿī too. The Kashshāf is used throughout his tafsīr as an authority in linguistic matters in his Qurʾān commentary, just as it had been used by his teacher Ibn Ḥajar, and is mostly cited approvingly and used to support his own opinions. Depicting Biqāʿī as having “railed against al-Kashshāf,” or as admitting to having used the Kashshāf, furthers the inaccurate portrayal of anti-Kashshāf sentiment in the Mamluk period. Similar can be said for portraying Biqāʿī’s Naẓm as a work in which he “had abandoned al-Kashshāf and had moved away from any heavy reliance on this work,” as well as the argument that Biqāʿī uses Bayḍāwī in his Naẓm as a replacement for the Kashshāf, since the latter is cited and used far more than the former.

One example alone from Biqāʿī’s Naẓm is illustrative of the high regard he and other scholars held for Zamakhsharī’s work, and his continued use of the Kashshāf. In this example, Biqāʿī is exploring how and why consecutive attributes may or may not warrant being conjoined with the conjunctive particle ‘and.’ This is precipitated by the recitation of ʿĀʾisha of the verse in Baqara (Qurʾān 2:38): “and the middle prayer, and the late afternoon prayer.” Biqāʿī explains why, on the assumption that the middle prayer is the same as the late afternoon prayer, the conjunctive particle separating them would be warranted: this is justified because both attributes are complete self-sufficient descriptions of the prayer being described. This is a discussion firmly within the purview of ʿilm al-maʿānī, which constituted one of the three disciplines of balāgha. It was Zamakhsharī who brought this discipline into that of Qurʾān commentary, and it is Zamakhsharī to whom Biqāʿī refers after some self aggrandizement at his having properly fleshed out what accounts for the presence or lack thereof of a conjunctive particle between consecutive adjectives. He writes,

So here you have it, a solid principle which I have long sought after, and have asked many a distinguished scholar about, to no avail. But I let my intellectual capacities roam in the various scholarly fields, until I finally formed this idea. Then, after I had finished with my exegesis, I saw that the Kashshāf had alluded to it in the verse and those who seek forgiveness late at night in Āl ʿImrān [Qurʾān 3.17], and God, glorified and exalted, is the one to grant success.

Biqāʿī’s point is that he came up with the answer himself; it was only after he had written that portion that he realized that Zamakhsharī had alluded to something similar in his explanation of another verse. Biqāʿī chalks it up to like minds being guided towards similar conclusions. The phrase he closes with, wa-Allāhu subḥānahu wa taʿālā al-muwaffiq, is a praise of God for granting success, but also a play on the idea that they both came up with the same idea. Aside from this being reminiscent of Sakhāwī’s complaint about what he thought was other scholars’ pompous buffoonery – it would not be surprising if Sakhāwī was alluding there to Biqāʿī, his bitter rival – Biqāʿī’s desire to on the one hand mark out what he came up with himself, yet at the same time connect it to Zamakhsharī, is a familiar feeling to any academic pleased at coming up with an idea, yet also relieved at finding it, or some trace of it, in the works of an established scholar. What Biqāʿī is doing in this example indicates that he views Zamakhsharī as an authority he wants his ideas to be associated with, not someone whose Kashshāf he considers deeply problematic, and seriously thinks ought to be banned.

10. On Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī trying to subvert or warn against the Kashshāf

A similar problem about overinflating the opposition to the Kashshāf in the Mamluk period can be seen in a reading of Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 756/1355), nearly a century before Biqāʿī. Subkī, who had studied the Kashshāf with ʿAlam al-Dīn Ibn bint al-ʿIrāqī, and had also studied grammar with Abū Ḥayyān, wrote a short treatise, Sabab al-inkifāf ʿan iqrāʾ al-Kashshāf (The Reason for Ceasing to Teach the Kashshāf), detailing his own history with the book and what led to his decision to no longer teach it. Saleh edited this treatise from a manuscript in the British Museum and was the first to study its contents.

Part of Subkī’s history with the book is detailing how he taught the book. This bears relevance to the purpose of this paper, which is to explore claims made about prominent Mamluk scholars taking noteworthy stances against the Kashshāf. Subkī is indeed one of the few Mamluk era scholars who took a decidedly anti-Kashshāf stance towards the end of his life, a problem I will return to below. The following discussion is not to contest this, but to clarify the depiction of him as having participated in this anti-Kashshāf sentiment throughout his teaching. In Saleh’s edition of the Sabab, Subkī claims that while teaching the Kashshāf, he was subverting and warning against it, but his students were nevertheless falling in love with it (unaffiru ʿan fawāʾidihi wa yughramu bihi). The notion that he would be subverting the work while nevertheless teaching it leads Saleh to question the genuineness of this narrative, that is, why Subkī “continued to teach, for most of his life, a work that he deemed so unappealing.” This scenario is additionally strange for another reason: the very thing Subkī admired about the Kashshāf was its finer points on Qurʾānic style, which he thought could not be found in previous works. For him to later claim that he was trying to subvert the work on these grounds would be noticeably odd.

It is unlikely that Subkī was indeed attempting to subvert the work while teaching it. Prior to his Sabab, Subkī was clearly enamoured with the Kashshāf. His prime interlocutor in issues related to Qurʾān commentary, in the letters, tracts, and answers compiled by his son to make up his Fatāwā (Legal Opinions) is Zamakhsharī; many, if not most, of his opinions on such issues start off by citing from the Kashshāf. The same can be said for a work he wrote on tafsīr, his al-Durr al-naẓīm fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm (The Strung Pearl: Explaining the Glorious Qurʾān). Little is known of this work; it remains unpublished, and only two partial copies are known to be extant. He seems to have started the work relatively early, and it may have been his taking up of an increasing number of official appointments that prevented him from finishing it. The Vienna copy of this work, which is an autograph, is dated in part to 734 AH (1334 CE); he would become chief judge in Damascus in 739 AH (1339 CE). Ibn Ḥajar had seen a volume of the work, and saw on its cover a couplet in praise of it, written in the hand of Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn al-Ṣāʾigh al-Ḥanafī (d. 776/1375). This couplet, with a partially legible sentence above it that seems to read “By Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ḥanafī,” is, remarkably, on the cover of the Vienna copy. It is not farfetched to believe that the Vienna copy was the one Ibn Ḥajar had access to. This tafsīr and that copy itself deserves further study. However, it is noticeable from even a cursory look in that work as well that Subkī’s prime interlocutor, and the work he often immediately engages with in interpreting verses, is Zamakhsharī.

Subkī was, similar to the description of Biqāʿī above, delighted at having found his own ideas validated in the writing of Zamakhsharī. Subkī is generally quite happy – as many are – at having come up with something he hadn’t heard elsewhere, for example writing that one of his ideas about the interpretation of a verse is “a brilliant point I gleaned without having heard it from anyone else.” He was especially pleased at finding that some of his ideas were not present in the Kashshāf, meaning that he had come up with something original not found in that exemplar. An example of this from his fatāwā, which also includes a number of his excurses in tafsīr, is his writing, “This is a good point, which grammarians have failed to mention, and which Zamakhsharī did not clearly articulate, even if he had indicated the foundation for it.” Subkī is also quite happy at discovering aspects of Zamakhsharī’s methodology; he worried over why Zamakhsharī did not follow Zajjāj, as he was wont to do, in a given interpretation, but was then pleased at having found out for himself the reason why.

Possibly most instructive with regards to Subkī’s relationship with Zamakhsharī’s work is what he wrote in his fatāwā at the end of a long piece justifying the way Zamakhsharī had explained a noun-adjective phrase which is being negated, found in Qurʾān Ghāfir 40:18. Some previous scholars had thought that the way Zamakhsharī had explained it did not make sense, and that because of that, he must have meant the opposite of what he said. Subkī argued that Zamakhsharī’s phrasing was intentional, and held special significance the way he had worded it. He ended his discussion by writing,

This is what has become apparent to me regarding Zamakhsharī’s phrase, which had previously been problematic to a group of scholars, who thought that it was backwards; there must be many examples of this which demonstrate the strength and keenness of his understanding, and which show how he alludes with few words to breadth and depth in meaning, although in his phrasing here he falls short of expressing his intent. This was a worrying matter. I was one of those who thought his phrase was backwards. I saw that an early scholar had a solution to this problem, but he did not really do anything to solve it. Then God inspired me with the solution, and it was as if the former difficulty had never been. Such is knowledge, it opens up with the slightest of effort. I am so pleased at the knowledge [or: the solution] God has blessed me with. It is to me better than this world and all it contains; no property nor wealth can replace it. I seek refuge in God from becoming conceited, or for me to accumulate pride in my soul, over this, yet I view it as a grace from God to me, despite my weakness and lack of cleverness, and my acknowledgement of the superiority of Zamakhsharī. Written by ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Kāfī al-Subkī in 751; praise be to God, lord of the worlds.

At least in 751 AH, about three years before he would write Sabab al-inkifāf in 754 AH, and about five years before he would die in 756 AH, Subkī had a far more appreciative outlook towards the Kashshāf that very likely did not include subverting or dissuading his students from it.

It is also unlikely that Subkī would try after the fact to portray himself as having unsuccessfully attempted to subvert the work. The phrasing that Saleh interpreted to mean this was already awkward in Arabic, and required some interpretation for it to make sense. This may be why what Saleh has in his edition, I warned people away from its finer points (unaffiru ʿan fawāʾidihi), is glossed in his study of the treatise as I warned people away from it (unaffiru ʿanhu). A better reading might come from other editions of the Sabab al-inkifāf treatise. It has been recounted by Ṣuyūṭī in two of his now published works. The first is a complete copy in the entry for Zamakhsharī in his Tuḥfat al-adīb (Gift of the Litterateur), a biographical work of scholars who participated in linguistic disciplines and had been referenced in Ibn Ḥishām’s (d. 761/1360) grammar work Mughnī al-labīb (Sufficiency for the Perspicacious). The second is a partial copy in his ḥāshiya on Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl (Lights of Revelation), his Nawāhid al-abkār wa shawārid al-afkār (Full Virgin Breasts and Stray Thoughts). The treatise in the edition of Nawāhid has only wa ana abquru ʿan fawāʾidihi, meaning ‘while I was fully explaining its finer points.’ Another option comes from the treatise contained in the edition of the Tuḥfa, which reads wa ana usfiru ʿan fawāʾidihi wa aʿūmu bihi, meaning ‘while I would unfurl its finer points and revel in it.’ Without recourse to the manuscripts of the treatise, or those of the Nawāhid or the Tuḥfa, an ultimate determination of this phrase cannot be made. However, what can be said with more certainty is that the reading in Saleh’s edition is not linguistically sound, nor does it fit the tenor of Subkī’s engagement with the Kashshāf. On the other hand, these other readings do accord with what we know of Subkī and his relationship with the Kashshāf prior to the Sabab. These readings are also superior because they allow for a fair assessment by Subkī of his own academic history, as opposed to a reading which inadvertently imputes to him what would certainly have been a mischaracterization of his past teaching.

11. On Qinālīzāde indicating that Samīn was disparaged because of the Kashshāf

The assumption of widespread discontent with the Kashshāf affects a reading of the scholar and chief judge of Damascus, and then chief judge (qāḍī ʿaskar) of Anatolia, Qinālīzāde ʿAlī Çelebī (d. 979/1572). Qinālīzāde wrote a treatise, al-Muḥākamāt al-ʿaliyya fī-l-abḥāth al-raḍawiyya fī iʿrāb baʿḍ al-āy al-Qurʾāniyya (High Adjudication on Pleasing Research over the Parsing of some Verses of the Qurʾān) in response to that of a Damascene scholar, Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 984/1577), who had written al-Durr al-thamīn fī baʿḍ mā dhakarahu Abū Ḥayyān wa ʿāraḍahu al-Samīn (Exquisite Pearl: Some of what Abū Ḥayyān Raised and was Objected to by Samīn). Both of these treatises were, as is fairly evident from their titles, about contestations over criticisms made by Abū Ḥayyān in his tafsīr of grammatical interpretations of the Qurʾān by Zamakhsharī in his Kashshāf, and rejoinders to these criticisms by his student al-Samīn al-Ḥalabī (d. 756/1355) in his own tafsīr defending Zamakhsharī. Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī’s treatise largely sided with the criticisms of Abū Ḥayyān, whereas Qinālīzāde mostly sided with the rejoinders of Samīn. Helen Pfeifer has discussed the social and historical background to the debate between Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī and Qinālīzāde through the framework of scholarly gatherings and the social tensions between Turkish and Arab speaking scholars and their respective scholarly worlds. Saleh, who also discussed some of this background, introduced Qinālīzāde’s treatise primarily as evidence – even if it was incidental to the main contents of the treatise – of a type of Ottoman intellectual history of tafsīr: a reflection on the history and the scholarly reception of the Kashshāf. Saleh argued that it constituted an alternative history by Qinālīzāde to the reception history of the Kashshāf presented by Suyūṭī in the introduction to his Nawāhid, which Saleh also analyzed. The treatise has thus been treated around the same time from different perspectives, both valuable, by scholars working in two different fields, Ottoman history and tafsīr.

Saleh writes that in his treatise, Qinālīzāde compared the merits of two prominent students of Abū Ḥayyān, Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Safāqisī (d. 742/1342) and al-Samīn al-Ḥalabī (d. 756/1355), both of whom wrote works of Qurʾān commentary. Their works were specifically in a subfield of grammatical parsing (iʿrāb) of the Qurʾānic text, and heavily engaged with their teacher’s Baḥr. Qinālīzāde had no doubt that Samīn’s work was the best of the genre, but, on Saleh’s reading, appeared to think that “because as-Samīn was a partisan of al-Kashshāf, some scholars were bound to disparage the work.” In the context of Saleh’s article, this point is not critical. However, the article is broadly about the reception of the Kashshāf. The idea that some scholars might disparage Samīn’s work because of its defense of the Kashshāf adds to the cumulative force of the various pieces of evidence that depict Mamluk-era scholars as having had a negative disposition to that work. In this case, it led to a type of guilt by association attitude towards other works and scholars in the field: it is alleged that Samīn and his tafsīr are being looked at with suspicion because his work defended the Kashshāf.

Qinālīzāde does compare the two students, Samīn and Safāqisī. He is quite clear that Samīn’s work is in his opinion far superior to that of his peer. Qinālīzāde’s comment about the Kashshāf, however, is made in the context of comparing Samīn not to his peer Safāqisī, but to their teacher, Abū Ḥayyān. Moreover, his remarks through this comparison of student and teacher do not support the reading that some scholars may have disparaged Samīn because of his support of the Kashshāf, but rather a situation of broad approval of Zamakhsharī’s work.

Qinālīzāde argues that the mere fact that Samīn levels excellent criticisms towards Abū Ḥayyān does not necessitate that he is of the same level as his teacher, or even anything close to it. Critiquing a large book, he argues, is a relatively simple task compared to the hard work of putting together a polished, finished product. This is obvious, he goes on to explain: there exist grand buildings, monuments, and ancient mosques, but they are now subject to architectural criticism from those who are devoid of any skill or ability, to the extent that they could hardly be expected to successfully place even one stone upon the other themselves. Moreover, he argues, there is another reason for Samīn to look like he is coming out on top over his teacher Abū Ḥayyān; he is supporting the author of the Kashshāf against Abū Ḥayyān’s criticisms. This is a work:

… which emerged from the heights of Zamakhsharī’s impenetrable excellence, and one which prominently displays as a chain of victory around one’s neck; anyone who supports such a superior and dominant party is necessarily positioning themselves for victory (wa li-anna al-Samīn muntaṣir li-ṣāḥib al-Kashshāf al-nāshiʾ ʿan shawāhiq faḍlihi al-ghidāf wa-l-jāḥiẓ niẓām kharazāt al-ghalaba ʿalā ʿunuq wa-l-muntaṣir li-l-ghālib ghālib wa-l-mustaẓhir bi-l-aqwiyāʾ fāz bi-l-maṭālib).

Qinālīzāde goes on to explain other reasons that Samīn’s rejoinders to his teacher’s criticisms were successful, one of which is that Abū Ḥayyān already had a preexisting negative disposition towards Zamakhsharī, and was therefore himself not the fairest critic. Because this bias impacted his critique, it was fairly easy for others like Samīn to respond to what amounted to his imagined criticisms, the kind that would not have occurred to the unbiased reader. Qinālīzāde is thus not hinting at Mamluk era discontent over Samīn’s work because he supported the Kashshāf; rather, his comments as a whole point towards the opposite. Samīn’s work could appear to position him on the high scholarly level of his teacher simply because he was taking the side of a scholar and work widely recognized as the current standard of academic excellence in the field.

12. The transition to Bayḍāwī: on Suyūṭī deeming the Kashshāf completely unacceptable

The transition to Bayḍāwī is one reason why a reconsideration of the evidence surrounding the negative Mamluk reception of the Kashshāf is important. The Islamic world would at some point adopt the Anwār al-tanzīl of Bayḍāwī, and that work would come to somewhat replace the Kashshāf in teaching and research. We do not have a full picture of this transition or replacement yet, and this article is not the place to attempt to weigh in on this substantively, except on the point of its intersection with the subject of this paper. There have been two recent and meritorious perspectives on this topic. The adoption of Bayḍāwī has been described by Susan Gunasti in an article on political patronage and Ottoman tafsīr writing. In it, she argued that this transition came about in the sixteenth century through an administrative process, namely, the adoption of the work as part of the Ottoman higher curriculum and madrasa system. A recent article by Saleh was the first wholly dedicated to this problem, and has already been cited above. Saleh presented an alternative answer to this shift, situating the prime movers of this transition in Mamluk Cairo, especially singling out Biqāʿī and Suyūṭī for their roles in prompting this move. Importantly, Saleh placed much greater importance on the role of theological considerations in this shift, meaning that the shift to Bayḍāwī was motivated by theological misgivings over the Kashshāf. The importance placed on the role these considerations played was one which Gunasti, in the Ottoman context, had argued was misplaced, even if plausible. I have already argued above that the evidence for a negative positionality towards the Kashshāf with respect to Biqāʿī is not sufficient; if anything, there is sufficient evidence pointing towards the opposite.

Assessing Suyūṭī is somewhat more complicated. Saleh argues that Suyūṭī dismissed the Kashshāf in his al-Taḥbīr fī ʿilm al-tafsīr (The Art of the Discipline of Tafsīr), and explicitly stated that Bayḍāwī’s Anwār was to be a replacement for it. This, Saleh contends, is a type of smoking gun proving that there was a theological impetus for the replacement of the Kashshāf by the Anwār, the result of “a long and protracted process that was the result of a Sunni entrenchment against al-Kashshāf at the end of the Mamluk period in Cairo.” He points out that Suyūṭī singled out the work as “completely unacceptable;” stated that the work of a heretic, especially one like Zamakhsharī, was inadmissible; cited in this context Subkī’s Sabab; noted Zamakhsharī’s affronts to the Prophet; approvingly cited Dhahabī’s warning in his Mīzān; and also negatively judged the work in his Itqān. All of this, Saleh contends, was part of what he deems a long process of an anti-Kashshāf sentiment in the Sunni Islamic world, a sentiment that started in the Arab provinces but then spread to the Ottoman realm, replacing the Kashshāf with the Anwār.

These claims about Suyūṭī are true, to an extent. However, there are noteworthy caveats. One is that his statements derive from a theoretical section of his Taḥbīr dealing with the prerequisites of an exegete, including the categories of individuals whose exegesis cannot be accepted. It is not the case that Suyūṭī says that the Kashshāf is completely unacceptable and inadmissible. Rather, in the context of this type of discussion, Suyūṭī is arguing that people who are known to have heretical opinions should not have their exegesis accepted by default. The reason for this, he goes on to explain, is that people of this category will interpret, often surreptitiously, verses of the Qurʾān in ways that were not intended, all in service of whatever pre-existing theological positions they hold. This is a reasonable thing to say in that context and is not about deeming a whole work unacceptable. This explanation is similar to how I described the aims of Dhahabī in his Mīzān above, where I argued that the genre of literature determined the type of judgements and language used to describe other scholars and their works. Given the similarity in aims in the types of literature, it is unsurprising that Suyūṭī immediately cites Dhahabī’s Mīzān here in this regard.

From another perspective, it cannot be the case that Suyūṭī really thought that the exegesis of Zamakhsharī was inadmissible. His Itqān, for example, a work that was in many respects a revision of the Taḥbīr, does not speak negatively about the Kashshāf. The negative judgement of the Kashshāf in the Itqān referred to above is, again, only in a theoretical chapter on the prerequisites of the exegete (and is a long citation of Ibn Taymiyyah’s Muqaddima at that). Furthermore, the judgment in that chapter does not have the type of practical import one may think: Zamakhsharī is himself later cited by Suyūṭī to weigh in as an authority on what constitutes improper exegesis, and is also cited to support Suyūṭī’s argument on the importance of knowing balāgha and Arabic style as a prerequisite for the exegete. If Suyūṭī did hold Zamakhsharī in low regard, he would not be citing his opinions on how to practice Qurʾān commentary as authoritative. Aside from theoretical discussions on how to do tafsīr, practically speaking the Itqān – and many of Suyūṭī’s other works – is filled with a wide range of Zamakhsharī’s exegetical opinions. In comparison, Bayḍāwī barely warrants mention in the Itqān, meaning that the sentiment Suyūṭī expressed in his Taḥbīr about Bayḍāwī being a sufficient replacement for the Kashshāf had no practical impact on his immediate scholarly production. Zamakhsharī’s opinions are often quoted approvingly in the Itqān and are far too many to list; for example, he is cited approvingly on the eloquence of multiple sequential parables in the Qurʾān; an explanation for an intensive form of an adjective in the Qurʾān; the connection between the beginning and the end of sūra 23 al-Muʾminūn; and the use and importance of tamthīl (metaphorical language) in the Qurʾān. He is also often given by Suyūṭī as the sole or primary citation in support of a point he is trying to establish; the examples of this are again far too many, but for example, he is cited to explain the use of īhām/tawriya (double entendre) and the use of istiṭrād (digression) in the Qurʾān. A work Suyūṭī thought was inadmissible would not serve in this way as a cornerstone to his own work on the Qurʾān, much of which concerns aspects related to Qurʾān interpretation.

The same argument can be made for Suyūṭī’s Nawāhid, but to an exponentially higher degree. The Kashshāf is cited and engaged with countless times. This is inescapable, given that one can hardly explain Bayḍāwī without recourse to the Kashshāf. However, there is nothing grudging about Suyūṭī’s engagement with the latter, belying some type of deep anti-Kashshāf sentiment. Suyūṭī treats Zamakhsharī as an authority throughout, much like he is treated in the Itqān. Indeed, he singles out Zamakhsharī for high praise in the introduction to this work, calling him the sultan of balāgha-based analysis of the Qurʾān and the one who trod new ground in this domain (al-imām al-sālik fī hādhā al-majāz ilā al-ḥaqīqa). He also corroborates Zamakhsharī’s claim to being the gold standard in the field for a linguistic type of Qurʾān commentary that became widely accepted and acclaimed (wa laqad ṣadaqa wa barra wa-rasakha niẓāmuhu fī-l-qulūb fa-waqara wa qarra). The examples of Suyūṭī’s use of Zamakhsharī in this work are far too many to mention, but they certainly belie the notion that he could have been harboring a deep bias against the book, while happily engaging with it in this manner for the two decades he spent writing the Nawāhid.

What is noteworthy for our purposes, however, is how Ṣuyūṭī does speak of the Kashshāf in his Nawāhid at an occasion when he sees fit to bring up Subkī’s Sabab. This occasion is the interpretation of Qurʾān Tawba 9:117: God has forgiven you; why did you grant them permission? The language used by Zamakhsharī in the interpretation of this verse, vis a vis the Prophet, was widely seen as inappropriately and unnecessarily harsh. He interpreted, for example, the former phrase (ʿafā Allāh ʿanka) as a euphemism for an egregious offense (jināya), and paraphrased its entirety as “You erred, and what a terrible thing you did” (akhṭaʾta wa biʾsa mā faʿalta). This language was jarring to Qurʾān commentators, who instead generally held that the phrasing of this verse was an example of how God speaks with kindness to the Prophet and elevates his status, since the Qurʾān here does not explicitly blame him, and also foregrounds forgiveness over rebuke.

Ṣuyūṭī, discussing this verse, writes that it was because of issues like this that some pious people turned away from and prohibited the study of the Kashshāf: “Because of this point [Zamakhsharī’s interpretation of Qurʾān Tawba 9:117] and others like it, people of faith and piety abhorred looking into the Kashshāf and forbade reading and teaching it.” It seems likely to me that Ṣuyūṭī is alluding here to Ibn Abī Jamra, who fits this description. It is also how Ṣuyūṭī introduces Subkī’s Sabab here. It is not unlikely that Ṣuyūṭī also places Subkī in this category, and thinks that this is how to make sense of his turn away from the work. Subkī did write the Sabab in 754 AH, towards the end of his life. In general, Subkī appears to have had something of a turn away from tafsīr towards the end of his life. None of his writings from the last few years of his life are on tafsīr. The last dated piece of writing of his having anything to do with tafsīr is from 752 AH, and even this is a piece of poetry reflecting on his life. The citation discussed above in which he praised Zamakhsharī was from 751 AH. After this point, there are numerous dated pieces of his writing up to 755 AH, but they are all on matters of law. It is not improbable that Subkī had a pious turn later in life, as he himself describes in his Sabab and as pointed out by Suyūṭī, which led to his disenchantment with the Kashshāf. This turn could even have been precipitated by his growing discontent with what he saw as Zamakhsharī’s lack of etiquette with the Prophet.

This, however, is speculative. What is important, is that Ṣuyūṭī’s reference here in his Nawāhid to those who abjured the Kashshāf is very different from the impression one might obtain from the Taḥbīr, in which he appeared to be one of those people. In the Nawāhid, however, he is speaking about them at a distance, without any indication that he might be one of them. There are at least two ways to make sense of this. It is somewhat plausible that Suyūṭī’s opinions mellowed over time. He wrote the Taḥbīr in 872/1468 when he was twenty-three years old. He would go on to write the Itqān a decade later, just before 883/1479; by the time he wrote this, he had removed this judgment from the Taḥbīr about the Kashshāf at its parallel location in the Itqān. Around the same time that he was writing the Itqān, he would start putting together the Nawāhid. He began compiling his notes for this work in 880/1476, when he began teaching Bayḍāwī, and was in the process of writing this work for about twenty years. It is thus possible that following the Taḥbīr, his view of the Kashshāf somewhat changed. While this is possible, what is more likely to me is what I have argued above about the context of the discussion of the Taḥbīr, the inverse of which applies to the Nawāhid. In the context of the latter work, which is to say Qurʾān interpretation itself, it does not make sense to espouse that type of condemnatory attitude about the unacceptability of the work; one is, after all, necessarily engaged in discussing and researching the Kashshāf and its related literature when one is compiling a ḥāshiya on another work in the domain of the former.

The caveats I have outlined above make it difficult to firmly place Suyūṭī within a narrative of a long-standing anti-Kashshāf sentiment, motivated by theological misgivings, in the Mamluk period. They further complicate the notion that there was such a deep undercurrent to begin with. This in turn calls for a reassessment of the argument that such sentiments were sufficient in precipitating the rise of Bayḍāwī in the Sunni world as a replacement for the Kashshāf.

13. Conclusion

Claims about the widespread nature of anti-Kashshāf sentiment, as I have attempted to demonstrate above, are vastly overstated. More often than not, they are factually incorrect. Correcting this record about the reception of the Kashshāf, aside from getting the history right, allows for a clearer picture of how Qurʾān commentary was being practiced in the Mamluk period, in which this work was heavily engaged with, and what motivated intellectual production in it. Theological considerations are sometimes portrayed as a motivating factor – often, the only factor worth exploring – in accounting for developments in Islamic intellectual history. In the case of the Kashshāf, a host of scholars have been implicated, in various ways, for adopting a negative stance towards the Kashshāf, motivated primarily by theological reasons. This is a significant list, including some of the most notable scholars in disparate fields in this period. When taken as a group, the Mamluk period as a whole begins to appear as one in which there is widespread resentment against the Kashshāf. The point of this paper has not been to argue that there were no theological considerations at play in the reception of the Kashshāf; that is certainly untrue. To that end, I have attempted above to highlight some of these critical responses, and to situate them in the broader reception of the Kashshāf. What I have shown, using a wide range of primary source material, is that theological considerations played far less a role than is otherwise thought. Most, if not all of the scholars discussed above had a far better relationship with the Kashshāf than has been intimated. Rather than being dismissed for theological reasons, the Kashshāf continued to be engaged with – and enthusiastically at that – in spite of any such reservations with the work. Moreover, the negative responses that were circulated often demonstrate the opposite of what one may assume. Far from demonstrating widespread resentment with the work, they tend to be repeated as noteworthy by virtue of how removed they were as exceptions to the rule. This requires a different account of what was motivating Muslim scholarship and Qurʾān commentary. The nexus of the Kashshāf, Bayḍāwī, and the ḥawāshī tradition is ripe for further study, after having had its foundations laid primarily (and almost exclusively) by Saleh. This paper builds on that framework in clarifying aspects of the reception of Zamakhsharī’s work, with clear ramifications for how the history of the subsequent literature in the wake of the Kashshāf is conceptualized.