Sufi Koran Commentary: a Survey of the Genre

Introduction

Although many Sufis wrote commentaries on individual su@ras (such as Su@rat Yu@sof) or particular a@yas, this survey only covers the Sufi tafs^rs that are extant and that generally dealt with the whole of the Koran (although such commentaries would often omit a number of a@ya per su@ra).  See Ate¶ (1974) for Sufi tafs^rs that are outside the scope of this essay.

While the only comprehensive scholarly work on this genre is the Turkish ˶a@r^ tefs^r okulu (Ate¶, 1974), Paul Nwyia investigated the primacy of the individual experience of the commentator in Sufi hermeneutics as well as the development of a Sufi vocabulary for expressing this (Nwyia, 1970).  Because Sufi commentators frequently move beyond the "apparent" (záa@her)  point of the a@ya@t(verses) on which they are commenting and instead relate Koranic a@ya@tto the "inner or esoteric" (ba@tÂen) and metaphysical dimensions of consciousness and existence, they have often been criticized (D¨ahab^, vol. 2, pp. 337-378; Mashann^, pp. 639-650).  The validity of such criticism is itself questionable, however, when it reaches the extent of conflating Sufi tafs^r with Isma@¿^l^ (ba@tÂen^ya) ta÷w^l.