Muslim Qurʾānic Interpretation Today

Johanna Pink’s work on the present scenario of Qur’anic studies is both informative and wide-ranging. Indeed, a massive activity in this field has been witnessed in the last twenty years: 45 new complete translations of the Qur’an in English alone and more than 1700 books and articles in English between 2000 and 2018 (For details see Sajid Shaffi, 21st Century Quranic Studies in English. New Delhi, Viva Books, 2018). Pink’s work reinforces the findings of the above bibliographical study on a scholarly plane. Rather, her analytical coverage is breathtaking. For, she offers a critique of the approaches of around twenty Qur’an scholars hailing from Egypt, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Iraq and Germany. More significant is the fact that many of them were born in the 1970s. So her insightful survey lets readers gain familiarity with the varied contributions of twenty, mostly young, Qur’anic scholars of various geographical regions, and more significantly, of diverse ideological presuppositions. Most of them present new paradigms in the tafsir corpus. This phenomenon of the expansion and enrichment of the horizon of tafsir writings is, nonetheless, not new. Throughout Muslim history, the best and sharpest Muslim minds were engaged in fathoming the contents of the Qur’an, in their attempt to derive Qur’anic guidance for tackling the issues and challenges of their times. This explains the wealth and abundance of tafsir literature. It is the intellectual, not merely theological, history of Muslims which is reflected at its sharpest in the different tafsir works, be it those of Ibn Kathir and Ibn Taymiyyah in the classical period or those of Sayyid Qutb and Sayyid Mawdudi in our times.