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Amin Ahsan Islahi, Tadabbur-e-Qur'an: Pondering Over the Qur'an, Volume One; Tafsir of Surah al-Fatihah and Surah al-Baqarah. Tr. Mohammad Saleem Kayani. Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust, 2007. Pp. 693. Hardbound. ISBN 978-983-9154-88-7. No price given.
The Tadabbur-i Qur'an is a monumental commentary of the Qur'an by Amin Ahsan Islahi (1322-1418/1904-1997), one of the most prominent pupils of the phenomenal Qur'anic scholar of the Sub-continent, Hamid al-Din Farahi (1280-1349/1863-1930). Covering nine volumes of about six thousand A-4 sized pages, this masterly work was completed in a span of twenty two years. If Farahi formally enunciated the view that the Qur'an possessed structural and thematic nazm (coherence), it is Islahi who established in this commentary that this was actually so. One of the far-reaching consequences of the nazm principle is that instead of deriving multiple meanings from the Qur'anic text, it effectively leads a Qur'anic scholar to the one definitive meaning implied by God.
The main features of the nazm elaborated by Islahi in this commentary may be summarized thus:
1. The surahs of the Qur'an are divided into seven discrete groups. Each group has a distinct theme. Every group begins with one Makkan surah or more and ends with one Madinan surah or more. In each group, the Makkan surahs always precede the Madinan ones. The relationship between the Makkan surahs and Madinan surahs of each group is that of the root of a tree and its branches.
2. In every group, the various phases of the Prophet Muhammad's mission are depicted.
3. Two surahs of each group form a pair so that each member of the pair complements the other in various ways. Surah al-Fatihah, however, is an exception to this pattern: it is an introduction to the whole of the Qur'an as well as to the first group which begins with it. There are also some surahs which are an exception to this rule.
4. Each surah has specific addressees and a central theme around which the contents of the surah revolve. Every surah is composed of sections, subsections and paragraphs which are not connected...