Early Qur’anic Exegesis ; From Textual Interpretation to Linguistic Analysis

This chapter deals with the types of exegesis found in the earliest commentaries on the Qur’an (second/eighth and third/ninth centuries). After discussing the authenticity of these commentaries, the chapter argues that their main purpose was to explain the meaning of the Qur’an. With the help of exegetical tools such as paraphrase, contextualization, and text typology, the commentators searched for God’s intention in the revealed Book. Linguistic analysis did not play an important role, as reflected by the paucity of grammatical terminology. When grammar emerged as an independent discipline at the end of the second/eighth century, it turned into a different direction: what had begun as analysis of the text now became analysis of the structure of the language