South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations: A Preliminary Intellectual History

Author(s): SherAli TareenSource: ReOrient , Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring 2020), pp. 233-256
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 SOUTH ASIAN QUR’AN COMMENTARIES
AND TRANSLATIONS: A PRELIMINARY
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY1
SherAli Tareen

Abstract: This essay presents a broad overview of certain key works and intellectual
trends that mark traditional scholarship on the Qur’an in South Asia, from the late medi-
eval to the modern periods, roughly the fourteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Far
from an exhaustive survey of any sort, what I have attempted instead is a preliminary
and necessarily partial outline of the intellectual trajectory of Qur’an commentaries and
translations in the South Asian context—in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu—with a view to
exploring how shifting historical and political conditions informed new ways of engag-
ing the Qur’an. My central argument is this: in South Asia, the early modern and modern
periods saw an important shift from largely elite scholarship on the Qur’an, invariably
conducted by scholars intimately bound to the imperial order of their time, to more self-
consciously popular works of translation and exegesis designed to access and attract a
wider non-elite public. In this shift, I argue, translation itself emerged as an important
and powerful medium of hermeneutical populism pregnant with the promise of broaden-
ing the boundaries of the Qur’an’s readership and understanding. In other words, as the
pendulum of political sovereignty gradually shifted from pre-colonial Islamicate imperial
orders to British colonialism, new ways of imagining the role, function, and accessibility of
the Qur’an also came into central view. A major emphasis of this essay is on the thought
and contributions of the hugely influential eighteenth-century scholar Shah Wali Ullah
(d. 1762) and his family on the intellectual topography of South Asian Qur’an commentaries
and translations.

Keywords: South Asia, exegesis, translation, power, Mughal empire, colonial modernity

Introduction

Once while commenting on the importance of South Asia to scholarship on the

Qur’an, the formidable twentieth-century Indian Muslim scholar Abu’l Hasan
‘Ali Nadvi (d. 1999) boastfully declared: “The Qur’an was revealed to the Arabs,
recited in Egypt, and comprehended in India” (nuzila al-Qur’an fi’l ‘Arab wa
quri’a fi Misr wa fuhima fi’l Hind).2 Nadvi’s triumphalist pronouncement invites a

Franklin and Marshall College, USA

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234 REORIENT

healthy dose of skepticism. Yet, it is indeed difficult to ignore or deny the remark-
ably robust and long running tradition of works on the Qur’an in Arabic, Persian,
and Urdu (and indeed in regional vernaculars) that populate the terrain of South
Asian Muslim intellectual thought. However, much of this intellectual legacy
remains banished from the interpretive radar of Western scholarship on South
Asian Islam or on the Qur’an. In this essay, as a way to address this lacuna, I
will present a broad overview of certain key works and intellectual trends that
mark traditional scholarship on the Qur’an in South Asia, from the medieval to the
modern periods. Far from an exhaustive survey of any sort, what I have attempted
instead is a preliminary and necessarily partial outline of the intellectual trajectory
of Qur’an commentaries and translations in the South Asian context, with a view
to exploring how shifting historical and political conditions informed new ways
of engaging the Qur’an.
My central argument is this: in South Asia, the early modern and modern peri-
ods saw an important shift from largely elite scholarship on the Qur’an, invariably
conducted by scholars intimately bound to the imperial order of their time, to more
self-consciously popular works of translation and exegesis designed to access and
attract a wider non-elite public. In this shift, I argue, translation itself emerged as
an important and powerful medium of hermeneutical populism pregnant with the
promise of broadening the boundaries of the Qur’an’s readership and understand-
ing. In other words, as the pendulum of political sovereignty gradually shifted from
pre-colonial Islamicate imperial orders to British colonialism, new ways of imagin-
ing the role, function, and accessibility of the Qur’an also came into central view.3
The proposition I wish to explore here is that fractures in monarchical modes
of sovereignty, coupled with the emergence of new vernacular languages such
as Urdu, new technologies such as print, and indeed a more accessible public
generated the conditions for also approaching the Qur’an as a more accessible,
translatable, and in some sense, a more public text. But, as I hope to show, this
shift in the conceptual architecture of the Qur’an was not exclusively the product
of the conditions of colonialism.
Rather, the drive to translate the Qur’an for the benefit of a wider public was
already underway in the early modern period in the eighteenth-century, best
exemplified by the translation efforts of the prominent scholar Shah Wali Ullah
(d. 1762) and his sons. Moreover, Wali Ullah’s push to make the Qur’an accessible
to the public was part and parcel of his larger critique of monarchical forms of
life and politics in late Mughal India. The promise of empowering the masses by
means of Qur’an translation was entwined to a larger politics of anti-aristocracy.
Put more simply, the democratization of knowledge through translation at once
rebuked royal sovereignty as it amplified popular sovereignty. Power, knowledge,
and hermeneutics were inextricably tied.

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 235

However, and this is a point I will make repeatedly in this essay, in the early
modern and modern periods, the push to render the Qur’an more publically acces-
sible was nonetheless invariably couched in a hierarchical view of power whereby
the capacity of the individual and the masses to engage and understand the Qur’an
was contingent on the mediating authority of the scholarly class, the ‘ulama’. In
the religious imaginary of scholars like Shah Wali Ullah, his illustrious sons or
later towering traditionalists of the colonial era like Deoband pioneer Ashraf ‘Ali
Thanvi (d. 1944), the project of Qur’an translation and exegesis served to valorize
rather than undermine the authority of the ‘ulama’ as the sanctioned interpretive
conduits between God and the individual. Rendering the Qur’an more understand-
able and accessible to the masses did not equate to an argument for a modern
liberal individual unmoored from traditional sources and protocols of external
authority. Exactly to the contrary, as I will show in the course of this essay, among
the central purposes and outcomes of the Qur’an translation movement pioneered
by Wali Ullah and his family was precisely the solidification of the authority of the
‘ulama’ as the rightful interpreters and translators of divine speech.
For purposes of focus, I have limited the scope of this essay to the end of the
colonial period, and to Sunni engagements with the Qur’an. Moreover, I have also
limited myself to works in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, leaving aside a consider-
able tradition of Qur’an scholarship in regional vernaculars like Sindhi, Balochi,
Pashto etc. Let me begin by considering some important works on the Qur’an by
medieval and early modern South Asian Muslim scholars.

Traditional South Asian Muslim Scholarship on the Qur’an: The

Pre-Modern Legacy

In a remarkably informative and revealing Urdu text Tazkira-yi Mufassirin-i Hind

published by Shibli Academy in Azamgarh, North India in 19954, the scholar
Muhammad ‘Arif ‘Umari presents a detailed portrait of the panoply of scholars
who contributed to Qur’anic exegetical traditions in South Asia from the twelfth
to the seventeenth century CE. ‘Umari’s historical account shows that South Asian
Qur’an exegetes traversed multiple geographic, disciplinary, and linguistic territo-
ries. Moreover, often they were closely allied with the imperial rulers of the time,
and commonly boasted a noble socio-economic and/or prophetic pedigree.
According to ‘Umari, the first complete Qur’an commentary to have been writ-
ten by a South Asian Muslim scholar was a text titled Kashif al-Haqa’iq wa Qamus
al-Daqa’iq by the late thirteenth/early fourteenth-century scholar Muhammad bin
Ahmad Shurayh Marikli who died around 1327. From the village of Markal close
to Ahmadabad in today’s Maharashtra, Marikli’s 1126-page commentary in Arabic
was dominated by Sufi themes and references of famous Sufi masters.5 This trend

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236 REORIENT

is found in several important South Asian Qur’an commentaries of the medieval

era. For instance, the tafsir of the famous Chishti Sufi master Muhammad bin
Yusuf Husayni Gisudaraz (d. 1422) “the one with long locks/curls” titled Multaqat,
derived from his oral speeches and assemblies, was in large measure a substantia-
tion of the Sufi doctrine of Wahdat ul-Wujud (unity of existence.)6
Similarly, the late fourteenth/early fifteenth-century Indian Muslim scholar
from Ahmadabad ‘Ali ibn Ahmad Maha’imi’s (d. 1431) Tabsir al-Rahman wa
Taysir al-Mannan (also known as Tafsir Ahmadi or Tafsir Maha’imi) was heav-
ily inspired by the illustrious medieval Andalusian Sufi master Muhiyyudin ibn
‘Arabi’s (d. 1240) thought.7 From the town of Mahim (today the outskirts of
Bombay) in Maharashtra, Maha’imi was a major Sufi master and judge (qadi).
He was married to the sister of Ahmad Khan (d. 1442), the king of the Gujarat
Sultanate (r. 1411–42) who had also founded the city of Ahmadabad. Maha’imi’s
legacy continues to pervade the religious landscape of Maharashtra; the annual
commemoration of his death anniversary (‘urs) still attracts large number of
Muslims as well as Hindus. Maha’imi’s Qur’an commentary is saturated with and
alternates between philosophical, linguistic, and mystical themes. It also contains
a remarkably detailed and layered discussion on the import of various names asso-
ciated with the Qur’an’s opening chapter, the fatiha.
In the introduction to his commentary, Maha’imi likened the experience of
navigating the Qur’an to that of discovering precious jewels in an illuminated
ocean. Let me give readers a fragment of his oceanographic imagery in his own
words: “Whoever plunges into this ocean will find red sulfur (al-kibrit al-ahmar)
from knowledges that point to the treasures of God’s attributes, and will extract
red rubies (al-yaqut al-ahmar) from knowledge of His essence, and blue rubies
(al-akhab) from knowledge of His perfect attributes, and yellow rubies (al-asfar)
from knowledge of His actions in the realms of existence, radiant pearls (al-durr
al-azhar) from [the realization of] spiritual advancement and refinement which is
the “straight path,” and green peridots (al-zabarjad al-akhdar) from knowledge of
the condition of those who will be content as well as of those who will be miser-
able on the Day of Judgment.”8
Another particularly interesting example of a Sufi commentary is the case of a
certain Haji ‘Abd al-Wahhab Bukhari (d. 1525), who is reported to have died the
very day that the founder of the Mughal empire Zahir al-Din Babar (d. 1530) entered
Delhi. Bukhari was born in Uch and raised in Multan in Punjab. After moving to
Delhi during the reign of Sikandar Lodhi (r. 1489–1517), he had developed a close
relationship with a Sufi master named Shah Abdullah Qurayshi from the family of
the famous Sufi Shaykh Bahaudin Zakariyya (d. 1267). Henceforth, increasingly,
Bukhari became mystically intoxicated and antinomian in his ways, something that
was reflected in his untitled Qur’an commentary written between 1509 and 1510.9

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 237

The entirety of this commentary was based on the praise and commemoration
of the Prophet, a feature that propelled the sixteenth/seventeenth century Indian
Hadith scholar and Sufi ‘Abd al-Haqq Muhaddis Dihlavi (d. 1642) to conclude that
Bukhari wrote this commentary in a condition of spiritual ecstasy and intoxica-
tion. Dihlavi further opined that Bukhari often proffered eccentric interpretations
of even apparent verses, and thus most of his commentary was unreliable. Here it
is useful to note that for all of Bukhari’s alleged eccentricity and intoxicated spiri-
tual state, he was by no means marginal or peripheral to the scholarly or indeed
the political elite of India. To the contrary, he is said to have maintained intimate
relations with the patriarchs of the ruling Lodhi dynasty in India, although that
relationship went through its ups and downs.
But Sufism was not the only intellectual theme and current that informed
pre-modern traditional Qur’an scholarship in India. In fact, even Sufi oriented
commentaries like the ones described above were never divorced or even detached
from the law. Maha’imi, who remember was a judge as well as a major Sufi mas-
ter, made this point most clearly early in his commentary with a vivid architectural
metaphor: “Hastening to the inner [Sufism] prior to mastering the normative
injunctions of the outer [Islamic Law],” he quipped, “is like jumping to the center
of the house without having crossed its door (al-tasaru‘ ila al-batin qabl ahkam
al-zahir fa-innahu ka-l-bulugh ila sadr al-bayt qabl mujawazat al-bab).”10
One might couple Maha’imi’s instructive note with mention of important South
Asian Qur’an commentaries without a central emphasis on Sufism. For instance,
the first complete Indian tafsir in Persian, Qazi Shahabudin Dawlatabadi’s
(d. 1445) Bahr-i Muwaj composed sometime in the late fifteenth-century, pri-
marily focused on questions of grammar and jurisprudence.11 A prominent jurist
and grammarian, Dawlatabadi (like Maha’imi) was very close to the ruling elite,
headed in his case by the Sultan of Jaunpur, Ibrahim Shah Sharqi (d. 1443).
Ibrahim Shah, a well-known patron of the ‘ulama’, had accorded Dawlatabadi
the title of “The Master of Scholars” (malik al-‘ulama’) and also appointed him
as Jaunpur’s Chief Justice (qazi al-quzat). Dawlatabadi lies buried in the southern
enclave of the Sultan Ibrahim Sharqi Mosque in Jaunpur.
A notable interest in law and jurisprudence in South Asian Qur’an commentar-
ies was especially seen during the reign of the last recognized Mughal emperor
Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (d. 1707) who had also commissioned an extensive compen-
dium of legal opinions that came to be known as Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiriyya. A good
case in point is the Arabic commentary of the Hanafi scholar Mullah Jivan (d. 1718)
al-Tafsirat al-Ahmadiyya fi Bayan al-Ayat al-Shar‘iyya. Jivan was a teacher and
close associate of Aurangzeb and had served as a military judge in the Deccan for
five years. In addition to his Qur’an commentary, Jivan also authored the famous
text of Hanafi jurisprudence Light of Lights (Nur al-Anwar) that became a staple

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238 REORIENT

of the madrasa curriculum in South Asia. He had composed this text during a five-
year stay in the Hijaz (1663-1668) that corresponded to his late twenties.
Jivan’s tafsir was so called because his original name was Ahmad; it was writ-
ten between 1653 and 1658, and completed when he was only 21.12 It was first
published as a printed book in 1846 by the Ikhwan al-Safa press in Calcutta. Rather
than a chapter by chapter commentary, Jivan focused exclusively on those verses
in the Qur’an that in his view engaged normative laws and injunctions (ahkam),
as he strived to present interpretations that affirmed the Hanafi legal canon. For
instance, among the topics Jivan discussed included the law of retribution (Qisas),
normative rules concerning animal sacrifice, and marriage to previously polythe-
istic women.13 According to Jivan, he was inspired to write this commentary to
resolve a puzzle that had quizzed him since his days of youth: the precise number
of Qur’anic verses that deal with questions of normative legal injunctions (ahkam).
Having heard for many years that the illustrious medieval thinker Abu Hamid al-
Ghazali (d. 1111) had designated five-hundred such verses, Jivan sought to verify
this number on his own. His research led him to 150 such verses that in his view
explicitly centered on legal injunctions, thus disagreeing with al-Ghazali; though
Jivan couched his disagreement in the most respectful of terms by speculating that
al-Ghazali must have had in mind all verses that hold legal implications, rather
than just those containing explicit normative rulings on specific issues.14 At any
rate, what must be noticed about Jivan’s thematic Qur’an commentary is its nor-
mative interest in establishing Hanafi law as not only consistent with the Qur’an,
but also as the most authoritative of all legal guilds. The interpretive frame he
brought to the Qur’an was heavily, indeed primarily, informed by the project of
affirming the normativity of Hanafi law.
The intellectual landscape described here was intimately intertwined with the
monarchical power structures of Mughal and pre-Mughal India. Most scholars who
produced important works on the Qur’an (and most likely other disciplines) were
in some way attached to the imperial bureaucracy and structures of sovereignty.
Some were even appropriated for the explicit ideological agendas of empire. For
example, the sixteenth-century Qur’an exegete Abu’l Fayz Fayzi (d. 1595) and the
author of what is among the most remarkable early modern Qur’an commentaries
Sawati‘ al-Ilham (in Arabic) was a close confidante of the emperor Jalal al-Din
Akbar (d. 1605). The peculiar and incredible quality of this commentary, which in
its current printed form numbers a little more than eight-hundred pages, is that it is
written exclusively using non-dotted letters of the Arabic alphabet.15
Akbar would frequently take Fayzi with him on expeditions, and consult him
on administrative and political matters. Most importantly, Fayzi was among the
foremost scholars who helped Akbar in the propagation of the latter’s controver-
sial ecumenical religious movement Din-i Illahi, a role for which he was much

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 239

scorned and detested by many of his colleagues in the Indian Muslim scholarly
elite. Curiously, Fayzi’s own father, the well-known scholar Mubarak Nagori
(d. 1593) and author of an influential Arabic Qur’an commentary titled Manba‘
Uyun al-Ma‘ani wa Matla‘ Shumus al-Mathani had once been almost executed
by the same emperor Akbar on the charge that Nagori was a Mahdavi Shi‘ite her-
etic. He was pardoned only after some close associates of Akbar’s vouched for
Nagori’s piety. His son Fayzi’s induction and excellent performance as a court
poet and some other turn of events eventually allowed Nagori to win the emperor’s
favor and good ranks.16
From this brief sketch presented above, we find a vibrant Perso-Arabic intel-
lectual field of traditional scholarship on the Qur’an that was closely bound to an
imperial moral and political economy. Also, one gets the sense that in pre-modern
India Qur’an translation as a distinct domain of scholarship had not yet developed
as a notable enterprise. This is not to say that scholars did not translate parts of the
Qur’an from Arabic to Persian. But the labor of translation was usually morphed
into that of exegesis. For example, the late-thirteenth/early-fourteenth-century
Qur’an exegete Nizam al-Din Nishapuri (d. around 1327) who was originally from
Nishapur and then moved to and settled in India provided extensive translations
into Persian as part of his important Qur’an commentary Ghara’ib al-Qur’an wa
Ragha’ib al-Furqan. This commentary was completed around the time of his death
in 1327. As Muhammad ‘Umari has noted, if Nishapuri indeed completed this text
in India, then it qualifies as the first Persian translation of the Qur’an in India.17

Post-Imperial Shifts: Translation, Populism, and the Quest for

Accessibility

The gradual yet dramatic loss of Muslim political sovereignty in India in the
decades following Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, coupled with new technologies of
imagining, producing, and transmitting knowledge also generated new forms of
traditional scholarship on the Qur’an. Among the major new developments was
a more explicit focus on translation as a medium of challenging imperial knowl-
edge and power hierarchies, and the emergence of the vernacular Urdu as the
primary lingua franca of the Indian Muslim scholarly elite. And with the onset of
print in the nineteenth-century and the concomitant “fragmentation of religious
authority” into varied ideological registers (traditionalist, modernist, Islamist
etc.), Qur’an commentaries and translations also began to reflect these competing
discursive orientations. A figure who was central to the early modern and modern
career of Qur’an scholarship in South Asia was the eminent eighteenth-century
scholar Shah Wali Ullah who along with his sons Shah ‘Abdul Qadir, Shah Rafi‘
ul-Din (d. 1824), and Shah ‘Abdul ‘Aziz (d. 1823) authored some of the most

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240 REORIENT

important works in this field. They also pioneered a movement for rendering the
Qur’an more accessible to a non-scholarly elite audience, most clearly reflected
in their push for translations of the Qur’an into Persian and Urdu. This move-
ment, of which translation was an integral component, inaugurated a crucial shift
in how the Qur’an was henceforth approached and interpreted by South Asian
Muslim scholars.
Shah Wali Ullah’s attitude towards the Qur’an is best reflected in his impor-
tant and widely circulated Persian text (today most commonly available in its
Arabic translation) Major Triumph [in Elucidating] Principles of Qur’an
Commentary (al-Fawz al-kabir fi Usul al-Tafsir), henceforth al-Fawz al-Kabir.18
In this relatively pithy yet multifaceted text, Wali Ullah presented what might
be characterized as a scholarly toolbox for tackling and resolving the linguis-
tic and hermeneutical challenges that impede the Qur’an’s understanding. While
celebrating the Qur’an’s complexity, the thrust of Wali Ullah’s discourse was on
advancing a manual of Qur’an interpretation that aided in making a scriptural text
clothed in the intricate conventions of the Arabic language accessible to a non-
Arab South Asian audience.
Anticipating an often-rehearsed later modern argument, Wali Ullah was years
ahead of his time in astutely observing that among the delicacies of the Qur’an,
that also renders it a difficult text to decode, is that it does not follow the conven-
tions of a book between two covers, coherently divided into thematically arranged
chapters. Rather, he evocatively analogized, the Qur’an was like the edicts of a
king to his subjects that are scattered over time, and delivered piecemeal accord-
ing to the exigency of particular situations. Once several such edits are issued,
they are brought together as a collective compilation. Similarly, the Qur’an was
revealed by the absolute sovereign king, God, to his Prophet, as a gift to humanity,
in bits and pieces corresponding with the demands of a given moment. During the
Prophet’s life, while discursive fragments comprising the Qur’an were secure, the
Qur’an was not canonized; a process that was only undertaken and executed by his
immediate successors, and generated what came to be known as the “Mushaf.”19
Wali Ullah’s penchant for imperial analogies did not temper though his avid oppo-
sition to monarchical politics and modes of life; an opposition that was central to
his reform mission. Indeed, his efforts at rendering the subtleties of the Qur’an
accessible to a wider public was enabled by the shifting pendulum of political
sovereignty and reflective of his concurrent critique of Mughal politics.
To this end, he composed what is believed to be the first complete translation of
the Qur’an into Persian titled Fath al-Rahman bi Tarjamat al-Qur’an, completed in
1738.20 That Wali Ullah intended this translation for a popular audience is obvious
from the way he introduced it. As Muhammad Qasim Zaman, in a recent article on
Qur’an scholarship by Wali Ullah and his family notes: “Wali Allah made it clear

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 241

that the work was intended for a popular, lowbrow audience, among them the chil-
dren of soldiers and craftsmen, as well as ordinary believers not having the ability
or the leisure for the pursuit of advanced learning.”21 Building on Zaman’s insight,
let me engage Wali Ullah’s brief but remarkable introduction (in Persian of course)
to his Qur’an translation in more detail, as it contains instructive clues about the
way he imagined the stakes, purposes, audiences, and desired outcomes of his
translation project. Wali Ullah described his translation labor as a work of moral
advice (nasihat). Moral pedagogy, he perceptively argued, takes different forms
at different historical moments and places. In the historical moment and place he
occupied, that of mid eighteenth-century northern India, “the religious guidance
of Muslims required a translation of the Qur'an in plain everyday Persian (farsi-yi
salis wa roz marah-yi mutadawal) unencumbered from rhetorical embellishments
and hermeneutical minutia, so that it might be accessible and comprehensible for
both scholars and commoners, youth and adults” (ta khawwas wa ʿawwam hameh
yaksan fahm kunand wa sighar wa kibar bi-yak wazaʿ idrak namayand).22
Dissatisfied with existing Qur'an translations, of which some he found tediously
long and others disruptively abridged, Wali Ullah decided to compose one of his
own. Interestingly, as he himself narrated, the actual text of Wali Ullah's Qur’an
translation came about through his lessons on the Qur’an to his students, as part
of which he would translate and then read with them the Qur’an in Persian. Soon
after, his oral translations began to be recorded in writing, and having translated a
third of the Qur’an, he decided to translate its entirety. He also instructed his pupils
to align and match his translation with the Arabic Qur’anic text, thus producing
a complete translation. This task was completed on the day of the ‘Id of sacrifice
(‘Id al-Adha) in 1150 A.H., which is roughly first week of April 1738.23
That Wali Ullah's Qur'an translation emerged from the pedagogical context of
the classroom was also reflected in how he imagined its use and application among
his audience. Wali Ullah primarily imagined his translation as a pedagogical tool
for the moral education of the youth, military, and the labor class unfamiliar with
Arabic and its subtleties. Teaching this Qur’an translation to these groups of peo-
ple, Wali Ullah claimed, “will enable them to discover sweetness in their recitation
of the Qur’an” (in kitab ishan ra bayad amukht ta dar talawat-i Qur’an halawa-
tay yaband). As he pithily yet instructively added: “I anticipate [this translation]
to benefit the Muslim public” (manfa‘at-i an dar haqq-i jamhur-i musalmanan
mutawaqqa‘ ast).24 What we find in Wali Ullah's statement here is a clear indi-
cation of an emerging notion of a distinct "Muslim public" available for moral
pedagogy and reform through the labor of translation, a notion and assumption
that would attain increasing clarity and delineation in the coming decades.
In an arresting passage in his introduction, Wali Ullah outlined his prescription
for how his Qur'an translation ought to be read, studied, and taught. Critically, he

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242 REORIENT

emphasized that to maximize the benefits from this translation, it should be exam-
ined in small study circles rather than individually. Why? Because this was the
method of the Prophet’s Companions, and thus imitating their method meant imi-
tating them. Here, Wali Ullah inverted the usually negative connotation attached
to the term "reprehensible imitation" or tashabbuh in Muslim thought that serves
to warn Muslims of imitating the religious practices and customs of non-Muslims,
a warning traced to the Prophet's famous saying “whoever imitates a commu-
nity becomes one of them.” Wali Ullah though transferred the term tashabbuh
to an antipodal register of meaning by urging a practice of collectively reading
and engaging the Qur'an through which Indian Muslims might establish the bond
of affective imitation and in turn intimacy with the Prophet's Companions. In
Wali Ullah’s own words, “[Indian Muslims] must strive to imitate the Prophet’s
Companions who would also sit together in study circles [while one of them]
recited the Qur’an.” (wa tashabbuh payda kardeh bashand ba sahabah-yi karam
keh bi-hamin halqah halqah minishistand wa qari-yi ishan qir’at mi kard).25
More specifically, Wali Ullah instructed his audience to recite and read in
translation one to two chapters of the Qur’an in each setting, much as it was
customary among Indian Muslims to get together and read sections of major
popular Persian Sufi/literary texts like Rumi’s Masnavi, Sa‘di’s Gulistan, Attar’s
Conference of the Birds [Mantiq al-Tayr], and Jami’s Nafahat al-Uns. “If the lat-
ter represented meditating on the words of Muslim mystics, reading the Qur’an in
translation represented meditating on God’s words,” Wali Ullah poignantly put it,
as if urging his readers to adopt and embrace the Qur’an in translation as a regular
feature of their everyday lives, as they had with popular Sufi texts. He continued,
with even greater precision and purpose in his analogical reasoning, “if these
[Sufi texts] constitute the sermons of the sages, and the discourses of glorious
bosom scholars, then the Qur’an is the sermon of the sovereign most of all sages
and the discourse of the Lord of glory” (agar an shughl ba kalam-i awliya’ ast, in
shughl-i kalam Allah ast. Wa agar an mawa‘iz-i hakiman ast, in mawa‘iz-i ahkam
al-hakimin ast. Wa agar an maktubat-i ‘azizan ast, in maktubat-i rabb al-‘izzat
ast).26 The most noteworthy aspect of Wali Ullah’s discourse here is the stress
he laid on the importance of the sociality of ideal reading practices that in his
view would maximize the benefits attached to his Qur’an translation. As much
as his translation project was about empowering the individual and the unlet-
tered masses, that promise of empowerment was contingent on the capacity of the
individual to participate in the larger social project of collectively cultivating a
moral public. The pedagogical force and purpose of Wali Ullah’s Persian Qur’an
translation was tied not to individual private study, but to it penetrating the every-
day sociality of the Indian Muslim public. In fact, the underlying purpose of his
Qur’an translation was precisely the curation of such a moral public that was as

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 243

captivated by the Qur’an, in its more accessible Persian translation, as by widely

read Sufi texts with household name recognition like Rumi’s Masnavi.
In addition to showing keen interest in how his Qur’an translation was read,
Wali Ullah was also avidly invested in the material form of the text. To this end,
at the end of his introduction, he advised the transcribers of his translation to pro-
duce the Arabic text of the Qur’an in bold and to make sure that its punctuation
marks and the letter Hamza are easily distinguishable from the Persian translation
below it. Further, he also advised them to add their commentary notes in the mar-
gins whenever they came across a word or phrase that in their estimation might
pose difficulty to novices and the youth.27 Therefore, not only was Wali Ullah
attached to the materiality of his translation, but he also seems to have seen his
Qur’an translation as a beginning to which future generations of transcribers and
teachers added their own notes and commentary, in a manner that amplified its
pedagogical efficaciousness.
For Wali Ullah, the promise of empowering the masses by means of Qur’an
translation was entwined to a larger politics of anti-aristocracy. Paradoxically, the
loss of Muslim political sovereignty and the absence of a Muslim state allowed Wali
Ullah to amplify popular sovereignty through the work of translation. However, his
movement to translate and demystify the Qur’an did not equate to a call for the
complete democratization of knowledge or flattening of hierarchies of religious
authority either. To the contrary, his push for translating the Qur’an and render-
ing it more accessible was firmly tethered to a hierarchical view of power. The
capacity of the masses to access the Qur’an depended on their attachment to the
mediating authority and expertise of the scholarly class. So, for instance, in al Fawz
al-Kabir, while describing the Qur’an’s “immeasurable rhetorical eloquence,”
and “unprecedented and unrivalled capacity for combining literary sophistication
with unshackled lucidity” as among the reasons for its inimitability, Wali Ullah
emphatically declared: “This is a matter of aesthetics that only those with expert
knowledge of poiesis can comprehend. The commoners don’t possess the taste to
understand this” (hadha ‘amr dhawqi yatamakkan min maʿrifatihi al-mahra min
al-shuʿaraʾ wa laysa li’l-ama min al-nas dhaʾiqa fi hadha al-‘amr).28 Wali Ullah’s
translation movement is thus best understood as a reflection of his pastoral desire
to make less daunting the prospect of accessing the Qur’an’s subtleties for the
masses. Moreover, his analysis of the art of Qur’an interpretation in al-Fawz al-
Kabir represented a detailed guidebook that sought to equip other scholars with
conceptual tools required to successfully execute such pastoral responsibility. To
repeat, the focus of this text was on identifying, detailing, and resolving the major
puzzles and difficulties, in relation to both the language and contextual dynamics
of the Qur’an, that hinder its comprehension. This was no popular text intended for
the masses, unlike his Persian Qur’an translation discussed earlier, but clearly an

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244 REORIENT

attempt to enable the scholarly class to effectively perform their role as translators
and interpreters of the Qur’an for the masses. So, rather than undermining ‘ulama’
authority, his model of engaging the Qur’an only amplified the position and indis-
pensability of the scholarly elite, even as that model contained an implicit rebuke
of the political elite. To put briefly and simply: for Wali Ullah, power, knowledge,
and hermeneutics were inextricably tied.
Wali Ullah also directed his son Shah Rafi‘ al-Din to author the first Urdu trans-
lation of the Qur’an, a task that Rafi‘ al-Din reportedly completed sometime in the
middle of the eighteenth century. While Rafi‘ al-Din’s translation was largely a literal
word for word translation from Arabic to Urdu, it was followed up by a more idi-
omatic translation into Hindustani by his younger brother Shah ‘Abdul Qadir titled
Explicator of the Qur’an (Muzih al-Qur’an) that was completed in 1790, and first
printed in 1829.29 As Qasim Zaman informs us, “over the course of the nineteenth-
century, ‘Abd al-Qadir’s translation would be printed numerous times, sometimes
independently but often with those of Wali Allah and Rafi‘ al-Din and in combination
with some other older works.”30 Importantly, in the introduction to his translation,
‘Abd al-Qadir described the language into which he had translated the Qur’an as
“popularly [spoken] Hindi” (Hindi-yi muta‘arraf) signaling his express desire to
reach a vernacular public. Clearly, the communalist assumption that Urdu and Hindi
as two language categories correspond to the two distinct religious communities of
Muslim and Hindu had not yet taken hold of the social imaginary of a late-eighteenth-
century Muslim scholar like Shah ‘Abd al-Qadir. He also stated explicitly that he had
conducted an idiomatic rather than a word by word (lafz ba lafz) translation of the
Qur’an due to the massive distance between Arabic and Hindi linguistic structures.
But, much like his father Wali Ullah, ‘Abd al-Qadir was also adamant that while his
idiomatic translation was meant to access and benefit the masses, the meaning they
acquired from his Qur’an translation was only reliable if they studied it under the
tutelage of authoritative scholars. As he pithily yet emphatically put it, “any meaning
of the Qur’an derived without [a scholar’s] stamp of authority is unreliable” (ma‘na-
yi Qur’an bi-ghayr sanad mu‘tabar nahin).31 In his introduction, ‘Abd al-Qadir also
narrated the process through which his translated was complemented with commen-
tarial notes, highlighting the contingency of the writing process. “At first, I composed
only a translation, but then on other people’s urging, I added additional commentarial
notes, separating them from the main translation with the help of distinguishing let-
ters. Transcribers who wish to produce an abridged text should only reproduce the
translation, and those who prefer a more detailed text should also include the com-
mentarial notes.”32 Again, much like his father, the manuscript of Muzih al-Qur’an
also showcases an author in Shah ‘Abd al-Qadir acutely invested in the reception,
production, and materiality of his intellectual labor.

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 245

This translation movement engineered by Wali Ullah and his sons was as much
animated by a drive for popular reform as it was by the realization that in the rap-
idly changing Indian public sphere, increasingly populated by British Protestant
missionaries and by other brands of internal and external competitors, reaching
and effecting the masses in the vernacular Urdu had become imperative. Such
a populist push did not go without resistance. In fact, at the time of its publica-
tion, Wali Ullah’s Persian translation had caused much controversy and backlash
among the Muslim scholarly elite of Delhi and North India; many had even called
this act of translation a condemnable heretical innovation (bid‘a). But nonetheless,
the three translations authored by Wali Ullah and his sons represented a major
moment in the intellectual and indeed in the social history of the Qur’an in South
Asia, a hinge moment that overtime was embraced by many prominent traditional-
ist scholars, despite the initial reactions of suspicion.
Notice for instance how the famous twentieth-century Indian Muslim scholar
Abu’l Hasan ‘Ali Nadvi, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, described
the impact of these translations on the Indian Muslim masses and indeed on the
broader Indian public sphere. Nadvi trumpeted, “Perhaps no other religious book
has achieved the kind of popularity and reception as these three translations; they
were read and recited in Muslim households throughout India. Millions of people
benefited from these translations, as they performed the work of religious reform
and the dissemination of the doctrine of divine sovereignty with remarkable effec-
tiveness. In fact, no Muslim state with all its resources could have achieved for the
purposes of proselytization and reform what was achieved by these three transla-
tions that are three branches of the same blessed tree.”33
Notice the way Nadvi’s thumping endorsement presents the absence of
Muslim political sovereignty as a catalyst rather than a prohibitive impediment
to the propagation of Islam and reform through the Qur’an. One does not have
to agree with Nadvi’s effusive assessment to acknowledge the seismic impact of
the Wali Ullah family’s engagement with the Qur’an on the landscape of South
Asian Qur’an scholarship in subsequent decades. Their translation movement
not only punctuated the significance of Qur’an translation as an enterprise, but
also profoundly informed approaches to translation in seminal works of the later
colonial moment. As a prominent example, one may cite the hugely influen-
tial Urdu Qur’an translation of the towering Deoband scholar Mahmud Hasan
(d.1920), simply titled Tarjama-i Qur’an-i Majid, that by his own admission was
based on Shah ‘Abd al-Qadir’s Muzih al-Qur’an and attempted to “update ‘Abd
al-Qadir’s language and expression”34 to render them more compatible to the
linguistic and sociological sensibilities of the early twentieth-century. But apart
from the Wali Ullah family’s persistent shadows, the modern colonial moment

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246 REORIENT

also saw the emergence of some important new trends and trajectories in the
intellectual history of Qur’an scholarship in South Asia, to a description and
consideration of which I now turn.

Competing Ideological Orientations: The Colonial Context

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as conditions of colonial

modernity saturated the public sphere, the Indian Muslim scholarly elite found
itself divided into multiple competing ideological camps with varied doctrinal
persuasions and understandings of tradition, catalyzing unprecedented intellec-
tual fermentation and polemical activity. It was not uncommon to find individual
Indian Muslim scholars embroiled in avid disagreements and even bitter polem-
ics even before the colonial period. However, what distinguished the colonial
moment was that in the decades following the 1857 mutiny in which Muslims
were brutally defeated by the British, intra-Muslim contestations took on an
increasingly group oriented character, as Muslim scholars became banner bearers
of opposing normative franchises/reformist groups (masalik/sing. Maslak). These
ideological divisions were also reflected in the varieties of Qur’an scholarship and
commentaries seen in this period.35 Prominent Hanafi traditionalist scholars wrote
major Qur’an commentaries and translations in Urdu, liberally interspersed with
Arabic. For instance, the towering Deoband scholar Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi’s Bayan
al-Qur’an36 and his equally formidable rival and founder of the Barelvi school
Ahmad Raza Khan’s (d. 1921) Kanz al-Iman37 are important examples of tradi-
tionalist Qur’an commentaries cum translations during this period.
The shifting hermeneutical sensibilities marking traditionalist Qur’an commen-
taries in the colonial moment can be usefully observed with a brief consideration
of the way Thanvi described the purpose and aspirations of his exegetical project.
Why another Qur’an commentary when so many were already around? Thanvi was
not the first or last scholar to address this gateway question that confronted any
new entrant into the populous and prolific field of Qur’an translation and exegesis.
Nonetheless, his response, recorded in the prologue to his commentary, provides
instructive clues regarding his self-imagination as an exegete, and sheds useful light
on how he viewed the intervention and audience of his exegesis. Thanvi registered
his profound displeasure at what he saw as the emergence of Qur’an translations as
a cottage industry in his midst. Sloppy Qur’an translations by lay authors, contain-
ing myriad errors that brazenly opposed the principles of normative law (qawa’id-i
shar‘iyya), circulated plentifully, with the sole purpose of reaping hefty profits.
Though financially lucrative, such translations did tremendous harm to the masses,
Thanvi bemoaned.38 Though he had written short epistles highlighting the doctrinal
problems afflicting these translations, an adequate treatment of this issue required

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 247

the composition of an entirely new translation cum commentary. Why? Because,

Thanvi curiously explained, “reading translations [as opposed to scholarly arti-
cles] had become the dominant register of public reading.”39 Therefore, in order
to wean the masses off faulty and heretical translations, they had to be directed to
and occupied with a formidable new alternative. And while the translations and
commentaries of the Shah ‘Abdul ‘Aziz family existed, they had not sufficiently
penetrated the masses. This through was no fault of the authors, but due to the
linguistic and intellectual incapacity of the masses themselves, Thanvi concluded.
Thus, he felt compelled to author a commentary and translation the language,
style, and content of which accorded with the temperament and sensibilities of the
contemporary masses. Thanvi was especially careful to frame his exegetical proj-
ect as a non-regional endeavor intended for Muslims all over India. It is for this
reason, he insisted, that he had avoided the use of any local idioms because “those
that circulated in Delhi would be foreign to people in Lucknow and those used
in both these cities incomprehensible in Hyderabad and Madras.”40 But for all
his emphasis on accessibility and public consumption, Thanvi was also adamant
that his exegesis/translation was not meant for individual private study. Echoing
Shah Wali Ullah, he firmly declared: “it is absolutely necessary that this exege-
sis, from its beginning to end, is studied under the intellectual supervision of a
scholar.”41 Though committed to writing in a language that might access and affect
the masses, Thanvi’s hermeneutical imaginary was nonetheless doggedly tethered
to a hierarchical vision of normative authority, much like Shah Wali Ullah’s a
century and a bit earlier.
According to this vision, the passage connecting the divine word and the indi-
vidual believer required the shepherding mediation of the scholarly class, the
ʿulamaʾ. Otherwise, that passage was too treacherous and volatile to be left to the
conscience and capacity of the individual. Thanvi’s commentary, in other words,
while clearly responding to the demands of a ‘modern’ Indo-Muslim public, was
not animated by a modernist quest for popular agency secured through an egalitar-
ian interpretive framework. To the contrary, maintaining and indeed amplifying
the pastoral authority of the scholarly class was inextricable to his exegetical
efforts. The broader point is this: the promise of accessibility does not always
translate into an argument for individual agency; and it is on this point that the
exegetical aspirations and self-imagination of a traditionalist scholar like Thanvi
most differed from that of an Islamist scholar like Sayyid Abu’l ‘Ala Mawdudi
(d. 1979) to whom I will turn to a bit later in this essay.
Often, the exegetical works of traditionalist scholars were couched in col-
lections of legal opinions (fatawa), and dealt with particular legal and ethical
questions through commentaries focused on specific parts of the Qur’an rather
than comprehensive verse-by-verse commentaries. For example, in 1920, Ahmad

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248 REORIENT

Raza Khan wrote a remarkable exegetical text that centered exclusively on verses
8 and 9 of Surah Mumtahana (chapter 60) titled The Conclusive Proof on the
Mumtahana Verse (Al-Mahajja al-Mu’tamana fi Ayah Mumtahana42). This text
was written in the context of the anti-colonial Khilafat movement the leaders of
which collaborated with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress to oppose the
British in their attempt to restore the Ottoman Caliphate. In this exegesis cum
juridical opinion, Khan engaged the theme of the normative boundaries of friend-
ship (muwalat) between Muslims and non-Muslims as seen in these two verses
in Surah Mumtahana, as he launched a devastating critique of the Khilafat move-
ment’s call for Hindu-Muslim cooperation. The trend of writing topic specific
commentaries (tafsir mawdu‘i) was also found among Muslim modernists such
as Abu’l Kalam Azad (d. 1957) whose popular commentary curiously titled The
Qur’an’s Translator (Tarjuman al-Qur’an) focused on specific themes and chap-
ters (primarily the first six chapters) in the Qur’an.43
Another remarkable instance of a topical Qur’an commentary was the unusual
late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century scholar Ubaydullah Sindhi’s (d. 1944)
commentary Qur’ani Shu‘ur-i Inqilab (The Qur’anic Conscience of Revolution),
published sometime between 1927 and 1939. A Sikh convert to Islam, Sindhi was
an anti-colonial conspirator who had transformed into a socialist revolutionary while
traveling in exile in Afghanistan, Russia, Turkey, and Mecca from 1914 to 1939. In
this commentary that primarily focused on early Meccan and some Medinan Surahs,
Sindhi sought to present and translate the Qur’an as a manifesto for a socio-economic
revolution that emancipated the underprivileged from the aristocratic industrialist
elite. Curiously, Sindhi’s main inspiration for his revolutionary exegetical and politi-
cal project was none other than Shah Wali Allah in whose writings Sindhi found the
most potent protest of what he termed a “capital worshipping mindset” (sarmaya
parastana zahniyyat); a protest that to him was also at the core of the revolution
announced and inaugurated by the Qur’an in the seventh century.44
The pressures and anxieties of modern colonial power were perhaps most
dramatically reflected in the exegetical labor of arguably the most influential of
nineteenth century Muslim modernist scholars Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898).
His Qur’an commentary, simply called “Commentary on the Qur’an” (Tafsir al-
Qur’an), engages roughly half of the Qur’an, and was first published in 1880, and
since its many editions have appeared. This commentary was distinctive on a few
fronts. First, it was liberally peppered with references from the New Testament,
with efforts to both connect the Qur’an to and also validate it through the Bible.
Second, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s commentary evinces an acute interest in defending
Islam from common missionary and Orientalist attacks, such as on questions of
violence and jihad, gender, and prophetic miracles. Third, and on a connected note,
his commentary also sought to present interpretations that dramatized Islam’s and

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 249

the Qur’an’s fidelity to rationalism and modern science. This last point of empha-
sis, though consistent with Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s broader intellectual project, was
also the most marked point of his departure from more traditionalist exegetical
works in his midst. According to Khan, the Qur’an was entirely compatible with
the laws of nature. Moreover, the absence of this compatibility was impossible
because such absence would signal weakness in God’s perfection and hence dent
His sovereignty: an impossibility.45
This position, which earned him the unceremonious moniker of “naturalist”
(nechari) from his rivals, informed his exegetical stance on Qur’anic verses that
in appearance seemed to contravene the laws of nature. So, for instance, notice his
commentary on verse 4 of Surah 105 titled The Elephant (al-Fil) that narrates the
moment (in 570 CE) when stones of hard clay had gushed forth from flocks of spar-
rows to pulverize war elephants of the Abyssinian army that had sought to destroy
the Ka’ba in Mecca. Khan offered a curious and resoundingly modernist reading
of this uncanny episode. This verse, he argued, did not refer to actual stone pebbles
that had killed the Abyssinians; rather the stones represented a metaphor for the
catastrophe that beset them and their imposing elephants. Moreover, he further
argued, the actual cause of their death was the diffusion of plague metaphorically
represented in this Surah by the figure of the sparrow (tayr).46 Sayyid Ahmad
Khan’s unease with miraculous exceptions that frustrated rational comprehension
also informed his position on the miracle of the Qur’an itself. Departing from the
long running doctrine that the miracle of the Qur’an lied in the inimitability of its
language, Khan instead argued that it was not the language but the meaning of
the Qur’an that was inimitable. But far more instructive and interesting than his
explanation for the Qur’an’s inimitability was his reasoning for propounding such
an explanation. A justification for the Qur’an’s inimitability centered on its con-
tent and meaning rather than its form, he proposed, promised a far more effective
talking point in the context of debating aggressive British Christian missionaries,
clearly reflecting the terrain and pressures of colonial modernity that shaped his
outlook on the Qur’an and on the labor of its translation and interpretation.

A Modern Public Qur’an

Apart from content and styles of argument, another major shift seen in South
Asian Qur’an translations and commentaries in the modern moment was their
pronounced emphasis on being accessible to a wider public. The desire for acces-
sibility was not only a product of the unprecedented opportunities for reaching
wider non-elite audiences through technologies such as print, railways, and the
postal system. In addition, inextricable to this desire were also new imaginaries
of reading scripture as a moral and affective experience, one that demanded novel

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250 REORIENT

ways of translating and presenting the Qur’an to the public. Particularly poignant
and instructive in this regard are the views of the twentieth-century Islamist politi-
cal theorist and activist Sayyid Abu’l ‘Ala Mawdudi who authored arguably the
most widely read, translated, and circulated Urdu Qur’an translation and commen-
tary in modern South Asia Understanding the Qur’an (Tafhim al-Qur’an47). In an
enormously engaging preface to this text, Mawdudi explained why he felt com-
pelled to write yet another translation and commentary of the Qur’an when such
a plethora of them already existed in South Asia. His reasoning reveals salient
features of a new conceptual and epistemic space occupied by the intellectual
labor of translation and exegesis in modernity.
Mawdudi contended that among his major motivations for writing this text
was to attract an “educated middle-class” audience unfamiliar with Arabic. Such
people, he noted, were uninterested in comprehending the intricacies of Qur’anic
exegesis. What they needed was a clear and uncomplicated understanding of the
Qur’an so that it could affect them in the way it was intended to. In order to
successfully achieve this task, Mawdudi emphasized, it was imperative to refrain
from literal word for word translations of the Qur’an. There were plenty of trans-
lations available that had performed just such a task. Instead, what was needed in
the modern moment was a more idiomatic translation of the Qur’an that captured
its affective registers and capacities. Mawdudi explained the difference between
these two styles by drawing on the distinction between what he called a translation
(tarjama) of the Qur’an and its representation (tarjumani). It is the latter mode that
Mawdudi preferred and sought to employ in his own work.48
The benefit of a literal translation, Mawdudi asserted, was that a reader could
know the meaning of every word. But this benefit was betrayed by a much big-
ger loss, mainly that such a translation failed to communicate the Qur’an’s flow
of expressions, power of utterance, eloquence of language, and effect of speech.
As Mawdudi put it, “[In such literal translations], the expressions one encounters
in translation below the Qur’anic Arabic are often so lifeless that they can hardly
enrapture the soul, move a person to tears, or convulse his emotions . . . In fact
often while reading such translations a person wonders “Is this really the same
book for which the whole world was challenged to bring forth a parallel?”49 In
Mawdudi’s view, exact translations, especially English translations of the Qur’an
with numbered divisions of the text, were especially distracting for a reader.
When a reader had to constantly move back and forth between the original and
the translation, and when an otherwise continuous text was artificially divided by
numbered paragraphs, that was bound to compromise the flow and cohesion of
that text and as a result, undermine its capacity to affect the mind of the reader.
The major challenge of translating the Qur’an, Mawdudi astutely argued, lay
in the fact that it involved the transformation of an oral speech act into a written

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 251

document. The hallmark of a good Qur’an translation, he continued, was its atten-
tiveness to the oral sermonic (taqriri) quality of the Qur’an and to ensuring that
the affective capacity of that quality was not deflated in its written (tahriri) form.
The risk in the transition from speech to writing or from taqrir to tahrir was the
possible evaporation of the emotive content of revelation. The task of the transla-
tor, Mawdudi emphatically argued, was to capture the intensity of the moment of
encounter between the deliverer of a sermon and his audience, and in the case of
the Qur’an, between God and humanity. In other words, for Mawdudi, the Qur’an
represented in essence a divine sermon. The drama of revelation could only be
narrated to readers without knowledge of Arabic through a broad idiomatic rather
than an exact word for word or sentence-by-sentence translation.50

Revisiting the Category of “South Asian Qur’an Commentaries

and Translations”

This was of course not the first time that someone had argued for an idiomatic
translation of the Qur’an. Remember, Shah ‘Abdul Qadir, Wali Ullah’s younger
son, had already composed such an Urdu translation in the early nineteenth-cen-
tury. Nonetheless, Mawdudi’s views on translation and exegesis signal a more
heightened awareness of and desire to meet the needs and demands of a new
public beyond the confines of a scholarly elite. Accessing and attracting this
public, for Mawdudi and for other scholars like him, not only required effective
ways of adapting to and mobilizing new technologies such as print. Moreover,
it also demanded the adoption of new discursive strategies of translating and
presenting the Qur’an in a manner most amenable to the modern sensibilities of
a new Indian Muslim public. Notably, meeting the demands of a modern mid-
dle-class did not entail suppressing but indeed amplifying the emotive registers
and capacities of the Qur’an. In many ways, Mawdudi had inherited and further
advanced Wali Ullah’s hermeneutical populism, marking a major shift from early
modern and medieval South Asian works on the Qur’an that had by and large
remained attached to the discursive and political economy of the intellectual and
political elite.
This shift did not only involve new imaginaries of the public, and new
approaches to encountering the divine text, but also to new understandings of
the interaction of the body, emotions, and hermeneutics, as seen most clearly
in the logics of Mawdudi’s hermeneutical posture. In a certain sense then, tracing
the intellectual genealogy of South Asian Qur’an commentaries and translations
reveals the emergence of an attitude towards the Qur’an increasingly attentive
to its affective dimensions and possibilities. This is not to argue that pre-modern
Qur’an commentators and translators were oblivious to the emotive and affective

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252 REORIENT

aspects of encountering the Qur’an. However, the passage of the Qur’an’s com-
mentarial tradition from medieval to early modern to modern South Asia does
suggest a palpably heightened normative interest in exploring and exploiting the
intimacy of text, body, and affect, as a way to access and capture the religious
imagination of a burgeoning middle-class public.
It might be apropos to conclude this essay by briefly meditating on, if not fully
addressing, the twin questions of what is particularly “South Asian” about South
Asian Qur’an commentaries and translations, and what has been their relationship
to and impact on global Muslim traditions of Qur’an scholarship outside South
Asia. The regional specificity of South Asia is obvious not only in how the par-
ticularity of its historical and political conditions and shifts have informed the
career of South Asian Muslim scholarly engagements with the Qur’an, as this
essay has shown. Moreover, the South Asian background of scholars who consti-
tute this tradition is also often visible and reflected in their discursive aesthetics
and choices, as well as in their keen sensitivity towards the task of easing the
compounded difficulty of rendering understandable and accessible a complex
scriptural text composed in a challenging non-South Asian language and idiom.
For instance, as discussed earlier, Shah Wali Ullah’s very project in his major
work on Qur’an hermeneutics, al-Fawz al-Kabir, was animated by precisely this
task. But one should not over-emphasize the indigenous texture of the South Asian
Qur’an translation and commentary tradition either.
This is so not only because of its intimate entanglement with and reliance on
the wider Qur’an commentary tradition and its key sources and textual archives.
In addition, the impact of the work of South Asian scholars on the Qur’an has not
been limited to the region either. A particularly interesting and somewhat unex-
pected example of such trans-regional and in this case cross-temporal intellectual
exchange is found in the Qur’an commentary of the eminent twentieth/twenty-first
century Tunisian scholar and exegete Muhammad al-Tahir ibn ‘Ashur (d. 1973):
al-Tahrir wa’l-Tanwir. In volume twenty-two of this thirty volume commentary,
while commenting on verse thirty-five of the Qur’an’s fortieth chapter, “al-Ghafir”
(The Forgiver), Ibn ‘Ashur invoked and lauded Ali Maha’imi, the fourteenth century
South Asian Qur’an exegete and Sufi master we met earlier. This verse reads as fol-
lows: “Those who quarrel about God’s signs without possessing any authority to do
so, God’s revulsion towards them is compounded, as it is in the view of the faithful.
God seals the heart of the boastful arrogant.” Qur’an 40:35). Ibn ‘Ashur credited
Maha’imi as among the rare exegetes he had come across who had explicated the
meaning and purpose of the additional clause “as it is in the view of the faithful” (wa
‘ind alladhina aminu) in this verse. Maha’imi’s explanation for this addition, which
Ibn ‘Ashur replayed and enthusiastically endorsed, was that the faithful here repre-
sent the manifestations through whom the truth and falsehood of those God reviles

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 253

become visible and apparent.51 In addition to citational mobility, another indicator

of the reach of South Asian Qur’an scholarship outside the region is represented by
the curious fact that although Shah Wali Ullah’s classic and widely read al-Fawz al-
Kabir was originally composed in Persian, it is today almost exclusively available
in its Arabic translation. Similarly, the most widely available and carefully edited
printed version of Maha’imi’s commentary is a three-volume edition published in
Beirut in 2011.52 Moreover, Mawdudi’s Tafhim al-Qur’an, especially in its English
online version, is among the most popular contemporary Qur’an translation and
commentary in the world.
But, even so, the global reach and recognition of South Asian Qur’an commen-
taries and translations should not be exaggerated. After all, despite South Asia’s
voluminous and intellectually diverse and distinguished contributions to this
knowledge tradition-rendered in at least three major Islamicate languages simul-
taneously (Arabic, Persian, and Urdu)-these contributions are rarely accorded the
canonicity of major pre-modern or for that matter modern Arabic and in some
cases Persian Qur’an commentaries from the Middle East. And it is perhaps this
sidelining of South Asian Qur’an scholarship within the tradition that explains the
paucity of attention it has attracted in the Euro-American academy. As prominent
scholar of Qur’an and tafsir Walid Saleh put it, as part of his magisterial overview
of Western scholarship on the Qur’an’s commentarial tradition:

There are bound to be significant and seminal works of tafsir that are still
untouched, works whose assessment will not only fill gaps in our knowledge of
the history of this genre, but are also likely to modify what we think of the cultural
significance of tafsir.53

While Saleh’s comments pertain to the exceedingly few tafsir manuscripts avail-
able in print, his words apply equally to the relative invisibility of South Asian
voices, actors, and texts in the overall field of Qur’anic studies. This essay has
modestly sought to address this lacuna by presenting a broad overview of key
works and trends that have defined the intellectual tradition of South Asian
Qur’an commentaries and translations, in the hope that it will pave and inspire
the grounds for more focused and detailed studies on individual works of exegesis
and translation.

Notes
  1. I would like to thank Margrit Pernau and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback
and suggestions. I presented different versions of this essay at the Annual South Asia Conference
in Madison, WI, 2018, and the International Qur’anic Studies Association Meeting 2019. I thank
all audience members at these venues for their questions and comments.

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254 REORIENT

  2. Nadvi (2008: 9).

  3. For more on the theological and political debates surrounding Qur’an translation in pre-mod-
ern and modern Islam in contexts other than South Asia, see the two excellent studies: Travis
Zadeh, The Vernacular Qur’an: Translation and the Rise of Persian Exegesis (2012) and Brett
Wilson, Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism: Print Culture and Modern Islam in
Turkey (2014). For a useful overview and analysis of the Qur’an’s commentarial tradition, see
Andreas Gorke and Johanna Pink (eds.), Tafsir and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring the
Boundaries of a Genre (2015).
  4. ‘Umari (1995).
  5. Ibid.: 1–5.
  6. Ibid.: 17–26.
  7. Ibid.: 27–50.
  8. Maha’imi (n.d.: 1).
  9. ‘Umari (1995: 62–5).
10. Maha’imi (n.d.: 4).
11. ‘Umari (1995: 51–61).
12. Tufayl (2008: 242).
13. ‘Umari (1995: 113–29).
14. Jivan (2012: 19–20).
15. Fayzi (n.d.).
16. ‘Umari (1995: 73–80, 85–97).
17. Ibid.: 7-14.
18. Wali Ullah (n.d.).
19. Ibid.: p.61.
20. Naz (2008: 171–205).
21. Zaman (2018: 282).
22. Wali Ullah (1980: 1).
23. Ibid.: 2.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.: 5.
28. Wali Ullah (n.d.: 80).
29. Hashmi (2008: 357–405).
30. Zaman (2018: 287).
31. ‘Abd al-Qadir (1790: 2).
32. Ibid.
33. Quoted in Hashmi (2008: 372–3).
34. Zaman (2018: 291).
35. For an excellent analysis of some major South Asian Qur’an commentaries in the colonial period,
see Bashir (2018).
36. Thanvi (1978).
37. Khan (1995).
38. Thanvi (1978: 6).
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.

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South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations 255

41. Ibid.: 8.
42. Khan (2006).
43. Faruqi (1982).
44. See Tareen (2017: 1–24).
45. Nadvi (2008: 11–36).
46. Ibid.: 31.
47. Mawdudi (2008).
48. Ibid.: 2.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.: 3.
51. ‘Ashur (2010: 144).
52. Maha’imi (2011).
53. Saleh (2015: 1646).

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