Ep. 21| Interpreting the Qurʾān in the Islamic West (7th – 11th c.): Tradition and Transformation in Tafsīr | Dr. Conor Dube

Episode 21

Release date: 

Hosts: Meryum Kazmi and Harry Bastermajian

Recording location: Media Production Center, Harvard University

Sound engineer: Jeffrey Valade

Audio editing: Meryum Kazmi

Audio elements (used with permission of the artist): "Al Andalus" by Shane Ivers via Free Music Archive

Photo: Okba Mosque, Kairouan, Tunisia / photo credit: Haythem Gataa via Unsplash 

Transcription: Otter (modified for readability)

Harry Bastermajian  00:04

Welcome to the Harvard Islamica Podcast. I'm Harry Bastermajian, 

Meryum Kazmi  00:08

and I'm Meryum Kazmi. We're excited to welcome Dr. Conor Dube, winner of the 2025 Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies for his dissertation "Interpreting the Quran in the Islamic West, 7th - 11th Centuries: Tradition and Transformation in Tafsir." Conor earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard in 2025, and is now a research fellow in North African medieval history at the University College London Institute of Archeology. Welcome, Conor. 

Conor Dube  00:40

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Harry Bastermajian  00:42

Yeah, it's great to have you. So, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your academic background and how you came to study Quranic exegesis, or tafsir, of the Islamic West? 

Conor Dube  00:56

Sure, I'd love to. So, my story began really, I would say, as an undergraduate. I did my undergraduate degree at Princeton, and by the time I got there, I had been studying Spanish for a good deal of time, and wanted to take up another language because I really enjoyed the experience I had with language classes, and I was debating between learning French and learning Arabic. And I figured, well, if I want to learn French, I can probably do that at most any point in my life, but if I want to learn Arabic, it really will have to be in college, or I'll never get around to it. And I just fell in love with the language, fell in love with the ways in which Arabic-- for me, Arabic has always been you open a new chapter, it's poetry, or it's medieval texts, or it's you know it's law, whatever it might be, and you realize that there's a whole world there that you haven't explored. And I've really always loved that aspect of Arabic. And so when I was an undergraduate, I was also very interested in questions around religious studies, questions around how it was that scriptural texts, these texts that have animated 1000s of years of traditions for people all around the world, came to have the meanings that they have. I mean, it's one thing obviously to read through them and to have your own understandings of what they might mean, but I'm very interested in the ways in which other people would read them and come to such a range of conclusions from them. And so those two interests kind of naturally came together for me. And when I was an undergraduate, I was looking at more modern tafsir. I did my master's at NYU and was lucky enough to delve more into the classical world then, and just fell in love with the way in which I think, especially tafsir in the medieval world, because it's commenting on the entire Quran and it is this ocean of meaning. It means that you are exposed to every aspect of the classical Islamic tradition, so you have to be able to do a little bit, of course, of theology, you have to be able to do a little bit of grammar, but also a little bit of things that are much further afield, like you know astronomy, if that happens to come up. Or so, so, and that's always been very, very fun for me because it means I get to bounce around and experiment a lot. So yeah, that's a little bit of the background of how I came to study what I study-that's great.

Meryum Kazmi  03:15

Very cool. So, can you also please tell us about the current state of scholarship on tafsir in the Maghrib? And I know you worked with secondary scholarship in European languages and also in Arabic, which is great. And can you tell us how your work fits into the existing scholarship?

Conor Dube  03:36

Yeah, so it's a really interesting question. I think a lot of people are very interested in tafsir, and I think in many cases they're interested in it because they're interested in what it can speak to in a particular area. You know, they're coming at it from a background of kalam, they're coming at it from a background of falsafa, they might be coming at it from a legal background. There's some wonderful studies on specific legal questions, looking at how they appear in different works of exegesis. My interest was always more integrative in looking at the body of tafsir as this kind of hermeneutic contribution, and that means, for me at least, trying to understand what's happening not just in specific areas of the tafsir, but across single texts and then across a group of texts. And I think it's that area where this question of the state of the field in tafsir studies is a really interesting one. There was quite a lot of work done, more so a couple of decades ago than more recently, on some of these questions of hermeneutics and the approaches that the medieval mufassirun would take to their texts, but that was almost entirely concentrated in texts that are coming out of the Mashriq, out of the East. So you know the work of Walid Saleh is a good example on al-Ta'labi, is a wonderful book, but focusing on somebody who is writing in a very particular sort of Nishapuri context, and with regards to the Maghribi tradition, there really isn't much in specifically in European languages. There's been a couple of attempts to do surveys to sort of look at what you know what authors were even working, and I think even that question has not really been fully explored. It's one of the things that I've tried to do. And just to hint a little bit at some of the major texts that are extant in this kind of early tradition, I'll say with regards to that that there has been a real resurgence in the study of the Islamic Maghrib in recent years. Not specifically, I would say, in tafsir, but more broadly, some really wonderful work being done, especially in French, but also in English on this. And so, it's a really exciting time to be studying the Maghrib. With regards to tafsir, in addition to that, you do have some larger works that are taking place in Arabic. I think there some of the they're really impressive achievements of scholarship in terms of the scope that they're able to cover and their familiarity, of course, with the primary sources. But they tend to be interested more in an evaluative perspective on the various exegetical works. That is to say, to what extent are they orthodox? To what extent are they not orthodox? And measuring them against that kind of barometer of orthodoxy, and I think that's a perfectly valid theological paradigm to come at these texts from. But it's not the paradigm that I am looking at them from. I'm interested in them as a historian of ideas, interested in the ways in which they are doing something similar to what's happening elsewhere in the Islamic world and doing something different. And so, for that question, particularly for the early period, and early period here, saying let's say before the 12th century, there's really been very little that's been done to look at the at the sort of broader state of the field.

Harry Bastermajian  06:47

Thank you. So you sort of already answered partially my next question, but could if you could tease out a little bit more for our audience the Islamic West versus the Islamic East, perhaps for those who aren't so sort of familiar with this, and also you know go in a bit more about you know why you focus on the second to fifth centuries hijri or seventh to 11th of the current era, and more broadly, sort of what is it that you want your reader to take away from this genre of tafsir?

Conor Dube  07:33

Yeah, definitely. So I'll try and be brief because I could talk for quite a lot about any one of those aspects, and I'll try not to. So with regards to place, the way that I approach this is looking at the Maghrib in an integrative sense, and so what I mean by that is one could look at, and some of the work in Arabic actually does this, look only at exegesis in North Africa. One could also look at only exegesis in Al-Andalus, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula. And I think there are one could justify both of those approaches. However, I think that there are good reasons to, and quite a lot of recent scholarship, not only in in sort of intellectual history, but in political history, even as far afield as cookbooks, looking at the ways in which it is quite important to approach the Maghrib as this kind of unified region, a region that was intimately connected on an intellectual level, on a political level, on a scholarly level, on an economic level, really from a very early point, and we can see that in the text here. We see people coming, for example, from Al-Andalus, from Iberia, to Qayrawan almost as soon as we see people studying exegesis at all, and so that's I think one important takeaway I had for this early tradition is how much movement there was already in an early period. That does render the question of place somewhat tricky. I mean, there are you have the ways in which I'm conceiving the regionality in this period. You have the Maghrib, you have the Mashriq, which is to say the East, and then you have Egypt, which is this very interesting tertium quid in between. So there are ways in which Egypt participates in some of the Maghribi conversations that tend not to make it much further east than there, and at the same time, Egypt is a transit point for some of the scholars who are going, who were raised in the West and who are going to the East. Nevertheless, I think there are some good reasons to think of Egypt as something separate. The trends that hold sway there, the people who are active there, some of the specific conversations, and even specific texts are received in North Africa separately from the way that they're received in Egypt, and so that's one reason why I segment that out somewhat from what's happening, sort of in quote unquote North Africa specifically. Although I don't think you can always sort of study them in isolation. So that's the question, the question of place. In terms of the question of period, it's quite a funny one actually. When I was first proposing this project, so my advisor Shady Nasser and I were talking through what I wanted to do for my dissertation, and he knew that I had Spanish and of course I had Arabic, and he suggested I look at the Maghribi tafsir. And at that point, I had been studying tafsir for a number of years, and I think like most people who studied tafsir, I was familiar with a couple of names of people who came from the Islamic West. The most famous two are probably Ibn Atiyya and al-Qurtubi, and I knew that I didn't want to get quite all the way to Al-Qurtubi because it's a quite different set of-- that's 13th century, and he's writing from Egypt, and it's a very different text. But I thought essentially what I would do is spend a chapter or two on the tradition before Ibn Atiyya, and then I would spend the rest of my dissertation looking at Ibn Atiyya. I think when I proposed it, I said he was going to be the first master, and it's a wonderful commentary. However, what I realized when I started to sit down and research and write was that there was an enormously rich tradition already before him, and that it would be impossible, in fact, to understand either his or al-Qurtubi's intellectual contributions without understanding that tradition, because it was quite literally what was on their desks. Many of these texts, people like Makki and al-Mahdawi, were basically the century prior to Ibn Atiyya, and really have received very, very little attention, and yet they're everywhere in that that later generation. The other thing that you have in the early period is a tremendous amount of intellectual diversity. So yes, you have the sort of Umayyad and then the Abbasid cultural spheres, but you also have a really important Ibadi community in what is today Algeria. You have the rise of the Fatimids and Ismailism, and so I realized that the other problem with telling that kind of linear story leading to Ibn Atiyya would be that you would erase that entire history of different ways of thinking about the Quran that that came before, and obviously I didn't want to do that, and so I really decided that that this I need to spend much more time looking at the earlier period.

Harry Bastermajian  12:31

Great, thank you. So in your first chapter, you talk about the origins of tafsir in the Maghrib. So, how did tafsir emerge in the region, and what did it look like in this early period?

Conor Dube  12:44

Yeah, so it's something of a tricky question. When I was writing this, it's an interesting exercise in how to write from a very elusive source base and a source base, moreover, there are not a lot of sources on the sort of very earliest moments in the Islamic West. A lot of them tend to be late, and you have the problem that many of the figures that we're dealing with are legendary, legendary figures, active at a time when founding myths are very much mixed up in the history of tafsir that I'm trying to tell. As you can imagine, the ways in which the Quran arrives in a new place, a new land of Islam, is not separable from the story of how Islam and political power arrives in those places, and so you have to be quite careful in assuming that every reference to Quranic teaching, for example, is necessarily a reference to actual Quranic instruction. So, as you know, just one demonstration of that, we have a lot of reports from the earliest moments, the earliest spread of Islamic armies across North Africa that say that you know some number of teachers were left to instruct the Berber tribes who were there. A lot of these reports are in quite late sources. Not all of them are, but we have no real sense of what that instruction would have looked like. Whether it was actual scriptural instruction, or whether it was just simply a literary topos by which these authors were signaling this is how Islam's dominion spread. And so that's one of the tricky things when you're dealing with this very earliest period of origins is that you have to attempt to disambiguate what we can be confident about and what we have to leave bracketed for now. That said, I think that we can say something about the early periods, and that's what I'm trying to do in that chapter in particular. We have there's no reason to doubt that early figures who we know were teaching often already in the East, sometimes in Egypt, did in fact come to Qayrawan, did in fact hold scriptural lessons. We have some interesting parallels from Eastern texts as to what those might have looked like. There's something called majalis al-dhikr, which there's only really one reference to this, but it stresses that in some of these introductory lessons, really the focus would have been more on orthopraxy, things like how to pray, how to fast, than it would have been on the nuances of the more academic reading of the Quran. And that makes good sense, right? That is comprehensible as to what we would expect to see. And so those kinds of things, I'm actually not as skeptical about as some previous scholars. I think there's no more reason to doubt them than we have to doubt anything else about this period, and the other thing that I think is interesting about this is that we have some really fascinating hints at rural education. So these are particularly coming from the Ibadi sources. We know that there were missionaries proselytizing in and across North Africa from a fairly early period, and we do have some hints that there would have been a diffusion of scripture not only in the major cities like Qayrawan, where you would have already a population that was coming from the East that would have already been bringing some scriptural learning with it, but also some hints at the ways in which it may have spread into rural areas, places like the Jabal Nafusa, which is in western Libya, again those remain tentative. But I think without endorsing the historicity of any single report, they give us a sense for the kinds of conversations and the ways in which scripture was moving in this period.

Harry Bastermajian  16:34

Thank you.

Meryum Kazmi  16:35

Thank you. So, in chapter two, you talk about the emergence of texts and books written about tafsir, and specifically, you talk about the figures of Yahya b. Sallam and Abdullah b. Wahb. So, who were these two exegetes, and what was significant about their works?

Conor Dube  16:55

Yeah. So again, this is an area where I could talk for quite a long time. Yahya b. Sallam, in particular, is I think a tremendously important figure who is getting more attention, but still not as much attention as I think he deserves for his significance in the history of tafsir. So briefly to talk about them, Abdallah b. Wahb dies in 812. He's working in Egypt, and the interesting thing about these two and sorry, Yahya b. Sallam dies in 815 and comes to Qayrawan. And the interesting thing about these two figures is that Ibn Wahb is, his text is what we think an earlier layer of exegesis would have looked like. It's called the Jami', and it's essentially a compendium. So rather than a text that goes through the Quran in order and comments on each verse or each pericope addressing whatever might be interesting about it, it's basically just disparate traditions. So and so said that this verse means this. This word means this, according to such and such a master. And what's very interesting about that is that that kind of hadith style commentary very much seems to be the way in which exegesis would have been taught and transmitted before this kind of book revolution that's happening somewhere in the early second century-- excuse me, second century hijri. And that that way of teaching the Quran, we think, would have been what was happening earlier than that in the East. Basically, you have these circles around authoritative scholars in major cities, and you have traditions as to what particular verses mean that get excerpted from those teaching circles and then put into personal notes, and then at some point concretized into collections. And that's what we have in Ibn Wahb. And this comes to Qayrawan with the generation after Ibn Wahb, so we know it was being taught in Qayrawan. By contrast, Yahya b. Sallam is a the basically the new model of tafsir, and the model of tafsir in some ways that continues until the present. This is-- Norman Calder looks at the formal characteristics that define the genre of tafsir, and one of the things that he picks out is this notion of sequential commentary, right? That you proceed more or less through the entire Quran in order, giving your opinions on verses as they come, and that's something that we begin to see. The early surviving example of it is Muqatil, who dies in 150 hijri, and he's a Mashriqi author. He actually may have known Yahya b. Sallam. They were both in Basra at the same time, so that's an important point, potential point of transmission. But Yahya b. Sallam, as I mentioned, is coming from Iraq, educated in Iraq, but then comes to Qayrawan, and the critical thing is that he comes to Qayrawan and he stays there. He does end up dying in Egypt, but when he comes to Qayrawan and he stays there, that's where his text is predominantly taught, and what that means is that when we're looking to reconstruct some of these early second century hijri debates, we can be pretty certain that the text of Yahya b. Sallam, as it's preserved for us, is reflecting an older stratum of exegesis that was already present in Iraq. And so, when we compare it to things that are later in Iraq, we can tell that the text when you when you go through them on a very granular level, clearly are showing the signs of difference that you would expect from oral transmission, but they're clearly reflecting the same texts. And to me, that gives me quite a good degree of confidence that in somebody like Ibn Sallam, we can reconstruct a very early model for the kinds of Quranic thought and teaching that would have existed in Basra, and of course, then come to Qayrawan and Ibn Sallam's text, in particular, becomes really the founding classic of Qayrawani Quranic commentary. It's tremendously important in the region for the next 200 and more years, and understanding the linkages of it with the East, but also the ways in which it has its own independent tradition in the Maghrib, I think is what makes it so fascinating. And I should just note here: a lot of that text has been published for a while. The Tunisian scholar Hind Shalabi edited from Quran 16 to Quran 37 a number of decades ago, but just a couple of months ago, a significant additional portion of the text was published in Tunisia, consisting largely of notes from Hind Shalabi's unpublished work, and so it's a tremendously exciting period to be citing these texts because we have a lot more that, for a long time, was only accessible in the archives in Qayrawan that now is somewhat more accessible. So there's much more to come there.

Meryum Kazmi  22:07

Can you share some examples of interpretations that you find in either of their tafsirs that you thought were particularly interesting?

Conor Dube  22:20

Yeah, I can I can maybe pick out two things and less specific interpretations, more kind of kinds of interpretations or ways in which I think that they're potentially significant in in their particular contexts. So the first one is with Ibn Wahb. So I mentioned he has this compendium, and there's basically two books of it that are specifically Quranic interpretations, traditions as to how you should interpret the Quran, and then there's another booklet that's sort of on more of a Quranic ethos, things like reciting the Quran, the ethics that one has when one handles the Quran, exhortations to piety of various kinds, things like that. And what I find very interesting about Ibn Wahb is that a lot of those traditions in both of those books seem to have this kind of propaedeutic educational context to them, so they are the kinds of things that you can imagine would be very useful for a newly Islamizing audience. Very particular linguistic glosses. There's a real interest in a few difficult words. For example, you have a lot of traditions on just a couple of words. You have traditions about the importance of going out and educating people, but also being humble in interpreting. And I don't think-- I mean you don't want to push that too far. These are traditions that you find in any number of authoritative Islamic texts from many different periods. And so I think it would be wrong to read that crudely and say, okay, the only concern here is basically to preach to a newly converted audience. But it is interesting, nevertheless, how this kind of orientation to the kinds of material that would be of use in places where you are sitting quite close to newly converted audiences, I think it is interesting and worth noting, and also because that kind of propaedeutic focus, this emphasis on introductory works on educational context, is something that continues right the way through almost the entirety of the Maghribi exegetical tradition prior to Ibn Atiyya, and in fact, not only the exegetical tradition. Jeremy Farrell is recently well he's about to publish a study on Quranic recitation, the qira'at tradition, and he finds that there is actually a very similar kind of an introductory, almost a textbook focus in Maghribi qira'at works as against Mashriqi ones, and so that's something is this very interesting kind of throughline that you can trace from a very early period until much later. The other thing that I was going to mention in terms of kinds of interpretation that are interesting-- one thing, and this actually gets back to the question on regionality-- one thing that I was very interested in looking at was whether, because you have in both North Africa and al-Andalus some very important both Christian and Jewish communities, and Christian and Jewish communities with sets of traditions that look very different than those in the Levant or in Iraq or in the Islamic East. And so I was very interested in approaching this material in the question of whether we find in the various exegetical works, any kinds of a reflection of that sort of local specificity of thought, any interactions, for example, with theologies or theological approaches or modes of belief that we don't find in the East, and the answer is no, which on the one hand is somewhat disappointing, it would be nice to kind of be able to say there's all of these conversations that we don't have in the East that we do have in Maghribi tafsir, but I think it actually tells us something much more important about the nature of tafsir as an intellectual approach, which is its conservatism, its emphasis on the authority of those who came before, and on authoritative ways of interpreting, such that what the exegete does, the exegete's performance is a particular recombination of past authorized material. You don't go out and do something entirely unprecedented, or you don't do that without good reason, right? And of course, in that dialectic, there's a lot, is much of the interest of what it is that I study. But specifically, with regards to this early stratum, it's quite interesting to me that you don't find those kinds of interpretations. It very much seems as though these interscriptural conversations, because there's quite a lot of, for example, biblical material in Quranic commentary in Maghribi tafsir, no less than in others, but it's everything that's already there in all of the tafsir that we find in the Mashriq, and I think that tells us something about when tafsir, when these communities were open and having these kinds of conversations, and when they weren't. There's a handful of exceptions I found, one of which is in one of the texts that’s basically a recension of Ibn Sallam's tafsir in the Ibadi community that has to do with Mary being born out-- excuse me, Jesus being born out of Mary's armpit. But we're talking a literal handful, like one or two things that I found in on these kinds of topics in Maghribi tafsir that I can't find in Mashriqi tafsir, and it doesn't mean it's not there; it just means I haven't found it. And I think if you're-- if you were to approach this material and expect to find something radically different in that way, it would be to you'd significantly misunderstand what was happening, and in many ways, the reasons for that I think are laid down already in this this early period.

Harry Bastermajian  28:00

Great, thank you. So, in chapter three, you discuss the intellectual milieu of North Africa in the third and fourth hijri centuries. What were some of the significant theological influences on North African tafsir, and also, just as a follow-up, you talk a little bit about-- you already talked about the sort of effort for rural education, right? That that was sort of borrowed from the Ibadi tradition. I'm curious to know what you think about how geography, the geography of the region, affected sort of scholarly mobility and impacted intellectual life during the same period.

Conor Dube  28:52    

Yeah, it's a great question. So a couple of things. First, on this question of the broader intellectual milieu in the third and fourth hijri centuries, as I've already mentioned, I think this is one of the most exciting parts of doing this work: that North Africa really is a mosaic of different communities with different intellectual interests. Interestingly, intellectual interests that, despite their differences, often end up having a certain kind of consanguinity, a certain kind of synoptic view on the Quran. You know, without wanting to kind of erase all of the differences, I think it's important to also understand that these are very-- and we have actual textual evidence for this-- these are communities that are praying next to each other in mosque in Qayrawan, for example, at least for a period, and so you end up balancing this kind of give and take, where you do have recognizably different scriptural communities and approaches to the Quran; at the same time, not wanting to draw a bright line between them, and I'll give an example of that in a second. So, you have, of course, around Qayrawan, which was always the most important center, a large body of what we can think of as proto-Sunnis and becoming Sunnis in this period. You know, you have the Mihna in in the early ninth century, which has a quite important reverberation into North Africa, and in some ways that reverberation makes the lines between different theological and confessional communities starker. So you certainly do have that tradition. That's the tradition in which Yahya b. Sallam is writing. That's the tradition in which most of his students in Qayrawan are operating. You have a number of students also, as I mentioned, coming over from al-Andalus, who are also you know we think of as broadly proto-Sunnis or Sunnis, and some of them actually write theological works that are books of Sunnah, so that's one important tradition, but not the only one, as I mentioned. You have the very important group of Ibadis. I had mentioned that you have an Ibadi community in the Jabal Nafusa in Libya. You also have the Rustamid kingdom polity, quasi-state network, whatever you want to call it. Scholars talk a lot about the nature of the Rustamids, but this is basically in what is today Algeria, espousing an Ibadi interpretation. And what I find quite interesting is there are certain things about Ibadism that are quite important in that context, but other than those sort of signal differences, there is much that it shares with the communities in Qayrawan. So, from this period we have a tafsir by somebody named Hud b. Muhakkam al-Hawari. We don't know exactly when he dies, but this is roughly the latter half, probably close to the end of the third hijri century. And essentially, what he does is he takes Yahya b. Sallam's tafsir, and he takes all of the isnads out because basically everyone gets rid of the isnads because they're too long and people don't like to read them. But more importantly, what he does is he translates the parts of it that he thinks are theologically problematic into basically what we can think of as an Ibadi vernacular. So the most important issue here is the question of faith and works, and emphasizing that one needs both faith and works. But other than that, he keeps most of the rest of Yahya b. Sallam's tafsir unaltered, to the extent to which, when I was in Qayrawan doing research in the archives, I was looking at some of the unedited fragments of Yahya b. Sallam's tafsir, and we have-- Hud b. Muhakkam's has been entirely edited-- and you can go back and read most of what Yahya b. Sallam is saying because it's already there in Hud b. Muhakkam. So that's how close these texts are to each other. And the interesting thing about Hud b. Muhakkam is that this is really one of the very few Ibadi tafsirs from the medieval period. There's somebody named al-Warjalani who's a couple 100 years later also writing from the Maghrib, but there's almost no sort of indigenous Ibadi tafsir, and so this is a very rare glimpse of what that would look like. And it's quite interesting that what it looks like is not terribly far from Yahya b. Sallam and this sort of authoritative tradition in Qayrawan. A similar example, slightly different, is the rise of the Isma’ilis and the Fatimids at the beginning of the 10th century. We don't have to get too, too far into the details of Ismailism and Batinism and all of that. This kind of esoteric approach, in many ways, but what I think is sometimes not emphasized sufficiently is that in addition to the esotericism and the more kind of recondite levels of Isma'ili thought, there is quite a lot that is exoteric in Isma'ili thought. Somebody like the Qadi Nu'man, who writes a number of different exegetical compositions in the 10th century in North Africa, in Qayrawan specifically, a lot of what he is writing there is exoteric and is in fact very similar to what you would find in any quote-unquote Sunni or contemporary quote-unquote mainstream exegetical text, and I think that that really tells us something about the ways in which these kinds of exegetical conversations-- there is this, I adopt this term from Walid Saleh, but there is this kind of core of understanding of how one should take the Quran that then ramifies, and where it ramifies is not always shared, but the core very often is, and you see that in Isma'ili communities in North Africa. You see that in Ibadi communities in North Africa. You see that in Sunni communities in North Africa. And I think again, it's this kind of push and pull between the similar ways of looking at the Quran, this kind of essential conservatism, and then where it where an author feels like they either have to or want to indulge their own interests, where they want to intervene in this conversation. That kind of dialectic is what I find so interesting about studying this material.

Harry Bastermajian  35:24

Great, thank you.

Meryum Kazmi  35:26

Before we move on, can you also talk about kind of the place of tafsir in the, I guess the scholarly-I don't know if you can say like hierarchy--

Conor Dube  35:42

Yeah, the formation, yeah, yeah.

Meryum Kazmi  35:44

Especially between these communities, the Ibadis, the Ismai'ilis, and the Sunnis. Yeah, how much emphasis was placed on it?

Conor Dube  35:52

So this actually gives me-I forgot to answer the question about geography and region and scholarly mobility, but this gives me a good excuse to circle back to that because it's actually quite relevant. So this is something I would love to have better sources for. I think there are some really evocative clues suggesting that what tafsir is, is something that most scholars do at a kind of a 100 level, fairly early in their careers, something that you're expected to have a decent familiarity with, but something that very few people are themselves specialists in, and I think you see this in the orientation of a lot of the compositions that are coming out of the Maghrib, which quite a lot of them, in fact, will explicitly say if you want a fuller treatment of this, go see my specialized work on X, Y, and Z, and so I think that tells us something about the audience for tafsir. And the other way that you can get this question of audience is when you look at authors who are not writing works of exegesis but are writing in other fields when they are nevertheless doing Quranic interpretation. When you compare those instances to what's happening in quote unquote formal exegesis, you see that they're quite similar. And the only real way to explain that is if there is some kind of common body of education that is disseminating this broadly shared view of Quranic meaning at a fairly early period in most scholars' formation. So I said this ties into the question of mobility, and what I mean by that is, at a slightly later period, you have a body, a fairly accessible body of tafsir in the Maghrib that people don't need to travel very far to get a hold of. Slightly earlier, it was not as easy to get a lot of authorized work, and you would have to go quite a distance. And so you have this institution called the rihla, the journey fi talab al-'ilm, or in search of knowledge, where scholars would go often an enormous distance in search of authoritative teachers from whom they could take lessons, be it in the Quran, in Hadith, in other fields, and this was very, very important. We see again for this early period, almost every scholar that we know of who's active in Quranic exegesis from the Maghrib is doing this, and sometimes they're getting quite far. There's one scholar named Musa b. Muawiya al-Sumadihi who is active right at the very, very beginning, the very first years of the ninth century, who gets as far as Ray, so essentially modern Tehran, and that's a huge distance. And actually, we have this quite nice account from one of his students telling some of the experiences he had-- you know, how what it would be like to walk into a mosque and know that you were supposed to be looking for an authoritative scholar and not know who he was, and then be pointed out, oh, he's the one in the corner. And so I think that element of mobility is really, really important. Not so much because it's necessarily showing up in all of the formal compositions, but because it is this kind of intellectual soup in which everyone is stewing, and that it is a way in which we see things being shared across regions. I think it's probably easy to take that irenically and say, "Oh, you know, everyone's traveling and everyone's sharing things here," and that's not true either. We don't see a lot of texts, as I mentioned, disseminating from the West to the East in this period. Largely, they're coming from the East to the West, and so I think we have to keep that in mind. We can't, you know, scholarly mobility is very, very important. Knowledge transfer is very, very important. At the same time, they're not equal transfers. There are dynamics of power already at this period that we have to keep in mind, and it's also important to keep that in mind when we think about the broader geography of the region as a whole. A lot of what we've been talking about today is North Africa, al-Andalus, we've not mentioned really at all what today would be Morocco or the Far Maghrib, right? And the reason for that is because we don't know very much about the ways in which Quranic learning disseminated there. There are a lot of quite small states, often states that are themselves affiliated with theological doctrines that are at odds with the powers in Qayrawan, I've written on one of these the Barghawata, who are alleged to have had a quote unquote Quran in Berber. It probably wasn't a translation, but it was in all likelihood some kind of a sacred text, and we know that the idiom of Islam, the various Islamic ways of thinking, certainly are making it to that region. But because they're not as connected to the worlds of Qayrawan and also some of the Ibadi texts, where we have surviving records, it's much more difficult to say anything concrete about Quranic learning in that part of North Africa at this period. Slightly later, we can say a little bit more, but in the early period, it's quite difficult.

Harry Bastermajian  41:05

That's great. Thank you.

Meryum Kazmi  41:07

Thank you. In Chapter Four, you discuss Andalusi tafsir in its emergent period. Tell us about that period in Andalus and some of its important exegetes and developments in the field of tafsir.

Conor Dube  41:22

Yeah, so this is an interesting one. It's another tricky period, and in this case, it's not because we don't have sources. There are quite a lot of biographical dictionaries, prosipographical sources dealing with al-Andalus, so we actually get a quite close sense of a huge number of scholars who are active either in tafsir specifically or in Quranic studies more broadly. What's tricky about this period is that we have a lot of references to people who are said to have written tafsirs that don't survive, and that causes some problems because on the one hand you have this trope of al-awa'il, which is the firsts, right? So the first person to do this kind of thing, the first person to write in this discipline, the first person to compose a Quranic commentary, and that gets back to this issue of tropes and legends that we've already talked a little bit about. When we don't have those texts, and in particular when we don't find transmissions from those authors in slightly later works. So I mentioned somebody like Ibn Atiyya, Ibn Abd al-Barr, who is another Andalusi scholar, not an exegete, but includes quite a lot of early exegesis in some of his works, al-Qurtubi, some of the other slightly later scholars. What we can do is we can go through them and see what is preserved in those texts from what we've lost. And so when you don't find anything from some of the early figures who are reputed to have had enormous commentaries and very important commentaries, you start to wonder if that is an actual text or if it was this kind of a founding legend. So we have, for instance, just to give you a name, somebody like Abd al-Malik b. Habib, who is roughly the early part of the ninth century, the third/ninth century, he an important commentary is attributed to him, but we know almost nothing of it. And so one of the things I'm trying to do in this chapter is track down, you know, what of these texts can we actually know what records survive? There's another scholar slightly later in the ninth century named Baqi' b. Makhlad, who Ibn Hazm says that he's never seen a tafsir as good as it in the history of Islam, neither al-Tabari nor any other. And if you know the history of tafsir, that's quite high praise. Tabari is, in many spheres, considered to be sort of the classical work of tafsir. And again, unfortunately, it doesn't survive. In this case, however, we do have just a few references that we can kind of pick out to at least get some sense that it was a text that people were looking at, and in fact, we can trace its transmission through his family, which was a prominent scholarly family for many years thereafter, and get some sense that it was that it was at least being transmitted, even if we can't say too, too much about it. The last person that I'll mention, and this is somebody-- I always ask people, if I was sitting in your shoes, my question is always, are there certain lost texts from the medieval period, is are there any one that you would just want to have back more than any other? And I think the person I'm about to mention is this for me. So this is a Zahiri named Mundhir b. Sa'id al-Balluti. Zahirism is a very interesting legal school and also theological approach that begins in the Mashriq towards the end of the ninth century, and Mundhir travels in the East. And it may be that he wrote the first Zahiri tafsir anywhere, and certainly in in al-Andalus. He's a very idiosyncratic figure, so he serves as an official judge for the Andalusi Umayyads, and in that role he rules as a Maliki, even though he's personally a Zahiri. We have all sorts of stories of him critiquing the caliphs. He served as a kind of a diplomat because he was of Berber origin, and so he did some diplomatic work in North Africa, and he had this very distinctive exegetical approach that is preserved again in a few later works on just a couple of questions, and what we see there is a real commitment to a profoundly different kind of hermeneutic, a kind of text immanent hermeneutic, not exactly the same kind of Zahirism that somebody like Ibn Hazm would have, who's you know the most famous Zahiri of the medieval period, and one that it would be just incredible to be able to read at greater length. But unfortunately, again, most of that text is lost. What I hope to do is bring out just enough to give a sense of how much we lost.

Harry Bastermajian  46;21

Yeah, very exciting find that's for sure. 

Meryum Kazmi  46:28

So in Chapter Five, you discuss curation, consolidation, and the linguistic turn. What was the linguistic term, turn as you call it, in the intellectual history of Andalus, and how did it manifest in tafsir?

Conor Dube  46:44

Yeah, so this is one of the ways that I've been trying to conceptualize something that I find very interesting about what we're getting to now, which is a slightly later period of tafsir across the Maghrib, so this is really a period in the later 10th, early 11th century when we see a very striking investment in the details of Quranic language. So the two main names here are people I haven't actually mentioned yet, both of whom grew up in North Africa. One likely in Qayrawan, the other in the city of Mahdiyya, both of whom ended up in al-Andalus later in their lives, both of whom are best known as Quranic reciters, but both of whom wrote tafsirs that survive. So one is Makki al-Qaysi, who dies in 1045, and the other is somebody named Abu-l-Abbas al-Mahdawi, who dies in-- we don't know exactly-- but again the middle of the 11th century, just a bit after Makki. And what you see when you look through both of their tafsirs, especially Mahdawi, is an enormous investment in these philological details. And so, what do I mean by that? Well, I'm using that term somewhat broadly to refer not only to kind of the technical details of Quranic grammar, but also things like qira'at, alternate ways of reciting the Quran, and principally a mode of interrogating the Quran that sees as the most meaningful questions one could ask of it linguistic questions, questions about language, an investment in the finest details and peculiarities of Quranic language. So that's very obvious in in those tafsirs that I just mentioned, but what I find very interesting is that it is happening already in a slightly earlier period. So you have another Andalusi author, somebody named Ibn Abi Zamanin. In a certain way, he bridges the two worlds that we've been talking about today, because what he does is he writes a mukhtasar, an abridgment, of Yahya b. Sallam's tafsir. And this is a true abridgment, it really shortens the text. And when he sits down to abridge it, what he does, in essence--and he's quite explicit about this, he says it in his introduction-- he gets all of the main takeaways from Yahya b. Sallam's tafsir, and he adds onto that a huge body of linguistic philological material, and when you go back and you look, not all of this is cited. But when you go back and you take the kinds of texts that he would have had access to at that point in al-Andalus, you can tell that he's actually citing these explicitly from works up to around a century prior to him, mostly coming from the East. And so what you see is this tremendous surge and flux of new philological ways of understanding both Islam and Arabic, and they meet exactly in this period, and it's a period when we know that philology, in a broader sense, was spreading into the Islamic West. So you have, just to give one example, a grammarian named Abu Ali al-Qali who comes, who basically is imported. He is given a plum post in al-Andalus, brought from the Islamic East in the middle of the 10th century, and really founds a new investment in language in linguistic approaches that has an enormous effect in the century after him, and we see this popping up not only in tafsir but also in a number of different Islamic genres in the Maghrib, and so I think that is another way, in fact, of indexing the question that we've been sort of talking about today, which is this idea of regionality and regional impact. You see this happening in authors who were raised in North Africa, who come to al-Andalus. Some of that has to do with political events, but they were in many cases incentivized by the investment of political powers in al-Andalus, specifically in language as a way of asserting a kind of royal prerogative. One boasted of oneself as the best king after the fall of the Umayyads in al-Andalus because one had the best scholars, and where would you want to have the best scholars? You want to have them in language.

Harry Bastermajian  51:19

Yeah, that's great. So going back to this this idea of the intellectual soup, which I love by the way, and in talking about knowledge transfer and scholarly transformation in your study of the Islamic West, how do you how do you feel your work sort of invites the reader, the student of early Islam, and the Maghrib in particular, to rethink the relationship between the center and periphery in Islamic intellectual history?

Conor Dube  51:54

Yeah, I think it's a lovely question and one that I've been grappling quite a lot with because I think naturally as scholars, our temptation, particularly as scholars of an area that has been marginalized already in the medieval period and right the way through to modern scholarship, I think the natural inclination is to say, well, no, we are a center, we're not a periphery, and I think that's true in some ways. I think when you approach what's happening in the Maghrib from the perspective of the Maghrib, without the preconception that it would necessarily have to follow or be secondary to what's happening in the Mashriq, it tells you quite a lot more about what the developments in Quranic thought are than if you had only that kind of derivative perspective. At the same time, I think that one can take that impulse too far. I've already mentioned some of the dynamics of power that I think one has to recognize in this period. Scholars working in the medieval Islamic West were incessantly importing things from the Islamic East, and we can track this chronologically. The estimates that I've done for the texts that I have access to in this period suggest that it takes about a century for something to make it from the Islamic East to the Islamic West, and that that looks like it speeds up towards the end of the period, actually. And that isn't really happening in the other direction. It's quite interesting that there are first real hints of that are at the very end of this period with Makki, but nevertheless, you can't deny that there is a differential in interest between things that are happening in the one region and things that are happening in the other. So I think we have to be attentive to both dynamics. The ways in which people operating in the Islamic West, scholars studying the Islamic West, had their own traditions that were for them central; Qayrawan was a hugely important place for scholarship and destination for students of tafsir, and the manuscripts from that period survive. I mean, they exist in Qayrawan to this day and were preserved there, and yet at the same time, understanding that there was this kind of a fraught relationship with what was happening in the Mashriq. You know, there are various models that we can use to try and conceptualize this. The notion of polycentrism, I think, is an interesting one, right? Thinking about the ways in which we have a multiplicity of centers rather than a center and a periphery. Achélien Montel has done some lovely work on some of these kinds of questions that that I benefit quite a bit from, and I think my main concern is to try and be sensitive to the ways in which imposing any one kind of assumed framework, rather than listening to the kinds of movements of the texts and the ideas and scholars themselves, would be to misrepresent the sources. And that's true-- that's as true as with questions of inter-regionality as it is with interconfessional questions. You know, being aware, for instance, of the ways in which lost texts really distort what we can know about what Quranic thought looked like because things aren't just lost for no reason, right? Things can be intentionally forgotten, and one of the reasons that they're forgotten is because they were unpopular, because they expressed something that was at odds with the kind of conservative tradition that I have evoked, right? We also have very little sense of what popular Quranic interpretation would have looked like. You know, outside of the world of the ulama, what an average person would have understood the Quran to mean is something to which we have almost no access. And so I think with these questions of center and periphery, really understanding that notion of marginality and periphery on multiple levels, and not just sort of you know east versus west or something like that, is really important.

Harry Bastermajian  56:03

Yeah, that's great. Thank you for that.

Meryum Kazmi  56:09

I do want to just kind of go back to my question that I asked before. I think I'm just this concept of scholars studying tafsir at the 100 level, I guess I feel like tafsir on the one hand it's seen as this like it's this like conservative science that you have to be very careful with. I guess I'm just trying to understand why more scholars don't study it, or didn't at a more advanced level, and it seems like that has been the case throughout Islamic history. Fiqh and hadith just get a lot more direct attention to them, so I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit more to that.

Conor Dube  57:05

Yeah, I think it's a really fascinating question, and any answer I have will be speculative, but I'll try and speculate quasi intelligently. So I think one of the things that you have, and I think you're exactly right to signal out fiqh, right? Because it's you have deeply hermeneutical reflection happening in fiqh on authoritative text, but the difference there is that it is explicitly expansive. So what you're doing you're doing two things in fiqh, right? You're either trying to formulate a ruling for a question that is ambiguous in some way, right? Either it's directly a question being asked in sort of like a nazila format, or it's a hypothetical that that you aren't finding for some reason in the authoritative text to which you have reference, or you're kind of making a compendium, and so you're just cataloging the various answers that others have given, or you're doing usul al-fiqh, right? Which is where you're really laying out a kind of a hermeneutical approach. What we see in tafsir is because you have a on the one hand a bounded text, right? So this notion of sequential commentary, you can always, for basically every pericope that you're interested in with the Quran, go back to a set of authoritative answers that, as I've tried to suggest, this is the kind of core that I was referencing, seem to have been there before we have written texts, right? They're already presumed by our earliest written texts. I mentioned somebody like al-Tabari, and I think one of the reasons al-Tabari is particularly important, not because he was the sum total of exegetical thought that was possible in the Islamic world, he certainly wasn't. Again, I'll mention Walid Saleh, who's done some fascinating work on al-Maturidi. And if anyone ever wants to read an exegetical text that is deeply surprising, you go and read al-Maturidi because it's fascinating. But for a lot of the Islamic world, what al-Tabari does is he clears the field in this kind of a pursuit, which is accumulating isnad-based traditional opinions on what the Quran means, right? And the reason that I find that interesting is because when you look at innovations that happen after that, at least for people for whom al-Tabari is a point of reference, and Makki, I didn't mention this, but Makki is in some ways a recension or an abridgment of an Egyptian exegete named al-'Udfawi, who almost no one studies, but was hugely important, and al-'Udfawi was in turn an abridgment of al-Tabari. So, when somebody like Makki, who's you know inheriting this kind of, we'll call it the Tabaristic tradition, is looking at what he can contribute, it's not in new traditions because that field has been cleared. It's in the provision of qira'at, it is in this kind of linguistic turn, and it's the same thing that when Ibn Abi Zamanin wants to add something to tafsir, he does. He goes to new linguistic interpretations that people hadn't in that milieu attested for the Quran before, and so I think that's really critical to keep in mind with this question of conservatism. I was very interested in thinking about this when I was writing the dissertation, and in particular formulating and theorizing the kinds of creativity that exist in conservative systems. And so there's some really fascinating work that's been done to think about what's called a systems idea of creativity, which is less creativity as the production of materially new points of view, and more about the innovation within a broader field in a way that is legible to that field. And so, with tafsir, if someone were to come out and say the Quran means all of these things, and it had no connection with the tradition that came before, it would simply be rejected, right? And this is why I had mentioned earlier that some of these lost works are tremendously both evocative and frustrating, because it may well be that there was in some of these works very different ways of looking at the Quran than what we have, ways that look more like that quote unquote creative approach. We see this also in some of the 12th century commentators. So Ibn Barrajan is a mystical commentator studied by Yousef Casewit in a wonderful book, and is somebody who is looking at the Quran in really unprecedented, well, at least when we have unprecedented ways, and it means that his text was not central to the tafsir tradition that came after him. Ibn Atiyya is also a tremendously creative text, but he's very careful about it. He always frames it in terms of engagement with tradition, so he does very often provide a quite radically critical voice, but he's doing it through these kind of guardrails of tradition. So I think-- I don't know if that exactly answers your question, but I think those are the kind of sociological and also disciplinary constraints that are active when we think about tafsir as against something like fiqh. And by the way, I mean fiqh is, you know, is creative in certain ways because of this kind of open-endedness, but is also tremendously conservative. I mean, it's funny. I mentioned that I'm working on some of these projects with the MedGreenRev project, and one of the ones that I'm working on right now for a conference in a month or so is a question around the legal category of staple goods. So what in Arabic are called qut, and that's really interesting because it's one of the very few areas where we can look at authors writing-- these are mostly Maliki authors writing in different geographic or temporal milieu-- and see an evolution because and they say this explicitly what's a staple good in one part of the world is not a staple good in another part of the world, right? But very often when you're looking at fiqh the experience is looking at the same chapter headings in a lot of different works saying almost exactly the same thing, and having to parse through the very significant differences, but nevertheless differences that require quite a lot of work to unearth. That's just easier to do in fiqh because we have so many more texts, and we just don't have as many in tafsir. Because, as you quite rightly say, it never was this kind of central science in the way that law was.

Meryum Kazmi  1:03:46

Interesting. All right, thank you. So, what is next in your research?

Conor Dube  1:03:54

Oh gosh, so much. So I'm currently working on a revision of my dissertation into a monograph, where really the goal is to-- a lot of what I was doing in my dissertation was very, very technical, because as I've said, some of these issues have not been studied very much, and there are some very small details that are quite important in piecing together the story that I wanted to tell, but in in getting this into a monograph form, I really want to broaden the scope a little bit and try and make this tradition as accessible as I can while doing justice to some of the nuances that we've discussed today. So that's an ongoing project. Currently, I'm working at UCL on the an ERC project called MedGreenRev or Mediterranean Green Revolution, and for that I'm looking at the same area, the Maghrib in North Africa in particular, but looking more at questions of environmental and economic history, which seem-- it might seem to be somewhat of a jump from the intellectual history, but I actually think they work together quite nicely because the ways in which we know from texts, at least, about these same questions are exactly the same ways in which we know about Quranic thought, often by some of the same authors or at least people who knew the same authors. So I have a number of projects ongoing with regards to that, some translation projects as well that are incipient, and eventually I have in the back of my head I have an outlines of a second book, which I would love to-- I mentioned at the start that I wanted when I was proposing my dissertation to get into Ibn Atiyya, and I thought that would be sort of the culmination of this tradition and the 12th century. And what I realized since is part of doing this project as well is that Ibn Atiyya-- I mean, he's a masterful exegete, and anyone who has access to that text should read it because it's incredible-- but he's just one of actually a panoply of 12th century exegetes that almost none of whom have been studied either. So I'm writing right now a couple of articles on somebody named Ibn Zafar, who may have grown up in Sicily, and there are a lot of other 12th-century exegetes, many of whom have gotten very little attention, with the exception of Ibn Barrajan. So at some point, I want to do a more essayistic exploration of what that period looks like, building off of having this basis of the Maghribi tradition before it, and really understanding what is unique about that sort of 12th century world of commentary, but that's a task for the future.

Meryum Kazmi  1:06:30

Awesome.

Harry Bastermajian  1:06:31

Well, thank you, Conor. This has been great, and I have to say, I learned a lot reading your work and learned even more here today. So thank you very much for joining us.

Conor Dube  1:06:44

Thank you both. It's been a real pleasure.