Salima farouki biography of abraham

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The fifteenth-century Qur’anic commentary or Tafsīr of ‘the two Jalāls’ (al-Jalālayn) — the Egyptian Shafi‘i-madhhab scholar Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Maḥallī (d. AH / CE), and his (also Egyptian) student the famous ‘ālim and polymath, Jalāl al-Dīn 'Abd al-Raḥmān b. Abī Bakr al-Suyūṭī (d. AH / CE) — is one of the most popular Tafsīrs in the Islamic world, perhaps even the most popular Tafsīr. Copies of it are available in almost every bookshop and library in the Arab and Islamic world, in dozens of different editions, and it sits, well-loved and respected, in countless homes, schools and mosques all over the world. Moreover, of the great Sunni Orthodox Classical Tafsīrs — what might be called the ‘unofficial Sunni Canon’ of Tafsīr — namely, the Tafsīrs of Ṭabarī, Rāzī, Qurṭubī, Bayḍāwī, Ibn Kathīr and Jalālayn, it is by far the shortest and easiest to read and understand. Consequently, it is invariably read as an introduction to Classical Tafsīrs — or even to Tafsīr as such — such that for millions of students and adults who never go further into the subject, it is the only Tafsīr they ever come to know extensively. Finally, because it is so accessible and ubiquitous, and because in Arabic it is always printed in a single volume, in the margins

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