Sufi Hermeneutics: the Qur'an Commentary of Rashid al-Din Maybudi.

• Author: Morris, James W.
• Position: Book review

By Annabel Keeler. Qur'anic studies series, vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the institute of Ismaili studies, 2006. Pp. xxviii + 378. $125.

The starting point of this dense and richly rewarding study is the immense early Persian Qur'an commentary begun by al-Maybudi in 520/1126, whose still widely popular ten-volume published version is commonly attributed in Iran to the famous earlier Khuasani Sufi, 'Abd Allah al-Ansari (d. 1088)--the inspirational saintly figure whose distinctive spiritual teachings are frequently quoted throughout Maybudi's work. Maybudi's only fully surviving book is, like most Qur'an commentaries, a masterful, yet highly personalized compendium of earlier Quranic commentaries and translations. More importantly, as the main title of this study suggests, Maybudi's voluminous work also constitutes a richly complex and lastingly influential creative literary reworking of a diverse range of antecedent "Sufi" literary traditions--especially the abundant hagiographies and classical manuals on spiritual practice, teaching, apologetics, and homiletics--in both Arabic and early New Persian from the two preceding centuries.

In many respects, Maybudi's compendium represents the culminating Persian synthesis and most visible literary landmark of what would eventually turn out to be key developments in the much wider shaping of later Islamic (not just Persian-language or "Sufi") religious tradition. Reflecting that complex historical situation, the focus of Keeler's analysis throughout this magisterial study is always twofold. On the one hand, she provides an abundantly illustrated account of characteristic aspects of Maybudl's distinctive rhetoric and literary style, hermeneutics, and his central spiritual themes and teachings. Simultaneously, each step of that dense "doctrinal" and rhetorical exposition of Maybudi's own writing is carefully interwoven with a constantly ongoing diachronic analysis of his literary and saintly predecessors and inspirations (and also, but in less detail, his more famous contemporaries and successors) from the converging domains of Qur'an commentary, hagiography, sectarian polemics, usul, spiritual practice, Persian literature, and the gradual institutionalization of nascent "Sufism." In that respect, Keeler's study offers such a detailed window into several decades of related scholarly research in Iran and the West (with a special emphasis on the contributions of G...