The Figures and Scholars of Objective-Based Tafsīr

By Dr. Ahmed Mohamed Ali Abouseif, President of the American Imams Academy.

Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī (d. 790 AH)

Author of al-Muwāfaqāt and the greatest theorist of the theory of objectives. He did not write an independent objective-based tafsīr, but he laid the theoretical foundation upon which this entire current rests; he arranged the objectives into necessities, needs, and embellishments, established that the Sharia was instituted for the interests of God's servants in the immediate and the ultimate, and clarified the ways of uncovering the objectives of the Lawgiver. He is the founding father from whom everyone who came after him proceeds, and scarcely any research on objectives is free of transmitting from him and building upon him.

Muḥammad al-Ṭāhir ibn ʿĀshūr (d. 1393 AH)

The figure of objectives in the modern era, the scholar of Tunisia and the shaykh of the Zaytūna mosque. He grounded the science methodically in his book Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa al-Islāmiyya, in which he called for making objectives an independent science, and applied attention to the objectives and aims of the sūras in his great tafsīr al-Taḥrīr wa-l-Tanwīr.

His great contribution is that he moved objectives from the field of the principles of jurisprudence into the arena of tafsīr as a practical application, and made for each sūra a unifying "aim" under which its discourse is ordered, so he read the sūra as a thematic unity rather than scattered verses. Thus Ibn ʿĀshūr is considered the most important bridge between al-Shāṭibī's theoretical grounding and the application of the moderns.

The Manār School: Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā

Shaykh Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1323 AH / 1905 CE) and his student Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1354 AH / 1935 CE) highlighted in Tafsīr al-Manār the guiding dimension of the Qur'an — that its objective is the reform of the human being and his guidance to the happiness of both abodes, not merely a display of linguistic and rhetorical topics and theological disputes. Their contribution was reviving the examination of the Qur'an's reformative goals and linking them to the reality of the Ummah and the questions of its revival; and though some of their independent judgments have been debated, their effect in reviving modern objective-based inquiry is great.

ʿAllāl al-Fāsī (d. 1394 AH)

The Moroccan scholar, author of Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa al-Islāmiyya wa-Makārimuhā, the third of three in objectives after al-Shāṭibī and Ibn ʿĀshūr. He added attention to the "noble traits" (makārim) of the Sharia — that is, its ethical and humane dimension, which surpasses the preservation of necessities to the completion of virtues — and connected objectives to the issues of revival, reform, and freedom in his time.

The Moderns and Contemporary Scholarship

Then the scholars followed one another in theorizing objective-based tafsīr, applying it, and devoting independent works to it. Aḥmad al-Raysūnī wrote Naẓariyyat al-Maqāṣid ʿinda al-Imām al-Shāṭibī, refining the principles and renewing the inquiry; Waṣfī ʿĀshūr Abū Zayd devoted al-Tafsīr al-Maqāṣidī li-Suwar al-Qurʾān al-Karīm as an expanded application that took Fī Ẓilāl al-Qurʾān as a model; and Nūr al-Dīn Qarrāṭ traced the presence of the objective-based method among the exegetes of the Islamic West. By the efforts of these and others, objective-based tafsīr settled as a scholarly current with its own rules, questions, gatherings, and studies.

The aim of this survey is not to exhaust the names, but to show that objective-based tafsīr is an edifice that generations of scholars cooperated to raise: the legal theorists grounded it, al-Shāṭibī theorized it, Ibn ʿĀshūr moved it into tafsīr, and the moderns revived it. It is the fruit of cumulative effort, not the independent reasoning of an isolated individual.

This is followed by the sixth article: "The Principles and Controls of Objective-Based Tafsīr."

| A takeaway for life: It is not enough to know the figures; we must read for them. Choose this month one book from the books of these scholars that suits your level — such as a concise treatise by al-Raysūnī or the introductions of Ibn ʿĀshūr — and read from it a few pages with deliberation. Keeping company with the original book builds the objective-based faculty more than dozens of articles about it. | |---|