Opposition to Word-Breaking in the Practice of Qur’an Commentary in Eighth/Fourteenth- and Ninth/Fifteenth-Century Mamlūk Cairo

Abstract

The Mamlūk biographer al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497) praised Sirāj al-Dīn al-Bulqīnī (d. 805/1403), the pre-eminent scholar and judge of the late fourteenth to early fifteenth century, for curtailing the practice of tafsīr al-Qurʾān bi’l-taqṭīʿ. This was a new category of Qur’an interpretation: a method of generating meaning through the use of word-breaking. The main proponents of this practice were the Shādhilī Sufi Ḥusayn al-Ḥabbār (d. 791/1389) and his followers, who perpetuated his exegetical approach. Attempts to curtail this practice of Qur’an commentary in Mamlūk Cairo were made by scholars and members of the judicial class, the most prominent among them being Sirāj al-Dīn al-Bulqīnī and his son Jalāl al-Dīn (d. 824/1421). This practice was policed not for its actual interpretations but because of its method, which undermined the shared philological basis for deriving meaning from the Qur’an. This study accounts for these historical controversies over word-breaking in interpreting the Qur’an, augmenting and correcting previous studies on the is subject published by Walid Saleh and Jonathan Berkey. It also analyses the role institutions such as the zāwiya and the office of the Shāfiʿī chief judge played in promoting such interpretations and regulating religious life and education. These controversies ultimately result from a tension between the oral and the written, as is demonstrated in this article by analysis of the use of word-breaking in the interpretation of the Qur’anic term salsabīl, and of similar problems of orality discussed in classical manuals on the proper recitation of the Qur’an.