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The author achieves something extraordinary with this book: for the first time in the history of Western tafsir studies, she manages to compare and contrast modern Quran commentaries from three linguistically different parts of the Muslim World and analyse these in their original languages (Arabic, Turkish and Bahasa Indonesian). Since Baljon's seminal 1968 study, which included Egyptian and South Asian commentaries, no other author has had either the linguistic ability or the contextual knowledge to combine two languages in their studies, let alone three. In addition, Pink has chosen several commentaries from each language (six in Arabic, three in Indonesian, and two in Turkish), on half of which nothing has been written before (e.g. the tafsir of Abu ZaḥrÄ, Taná¹Äwi al-Zuhayli and Sa(id HawwÄ). All of the commentaries examined here were published (even if written earlier) between 1967 and 2004, thereby updating Baljon's and Jansen's (1974) accounts by several decades.
After a short introduction (chapter 1), in chapter 2 Pink provides a brief survey of the historical development of modern tafsir since the nineteenth century, including an account of that earlier and pre-modern tafsir which served as a point of reference (Referenzkommentare, e.g. al-Tabari, al-RÄzi) for the authors she has studied. In chapter 3, Pink suggests a typology into which she wants to group her eleven commentaries: first, scholarly tafsir (Gelehrtenkommentare); second, institutional tafsir (Institutenkommentare); third, homiletic tafsir (Predigerkommentare), and fourth, a hybrid of all three (Hybride Formate). The first category is represented by the four authors Taná¹Äwi, al-Zuḥayli, Süleyman Ates and M. Quraish Shihab;...