A Traditional Mu'tazilite Qur'an Commentary: The Kashshaf of Jar Allah al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1144).

• Author: Bauer, Karen
• Position: Book review

A Traditional Mu'tazilite Qur'an Commentary: The Kashshaf of Jar Allah al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1144). By ANDREW LANE. Texts and Studies in the Qur'an, vol. 2. Leiden: BRILL, 2006. Pp. xxiv + 418. $183.

One of the problems facing scholars of tafsir and theology is that al-Zamakhshari's acknowledged Mu'tazilism does not seem to have diminished the popularity of his Qur'anic commentary among non-Mu'tazilite scholars. The demand for al-Kashshaf remained high, despite vehement attacks on it by influential Sunnites such as Ibn Taymiya and Ibn Hajar, and today libraries around the world contain hundreds of manuscripts and many printed editions of the work. Andrew Lane's thorough study aims to explain this mystery, among other aspects of al-Zamakhshari's life and work.

Appropriately, Lane begins with al-Zamakhshari's biography and scholarly ouevre, for which he has gone through numerous biographical and bibliographical collections. The biography is engaging and thorough. He places al-Zamakhshari in Mecca twice, with the latter visit being used to teach and to finish the final version of the Kashshaf (in 526-28/1124-25). As a prelude to what is to come, he points out that theology is only a small part of al-Zamakhshari's output, and that he was not primarily known as a theologian. This sets the stage for his later assertion that Mu'tazilite doctrine played only a minor role in al-Zamakhshari's Kashshaf.

Lane has done extensive work on manuscripts of the Kashshaf, which is clear in every part of the book. In an analysis of approximately 250 manuscripts, mostly housed in Istanbul, he shows that about half of the manuscripts have a postscript, but almost all of the manuscripts have an epilogue. As Lane says, "[t]he postscript first and foremost authenticates a single copy of the Kashshaf, what al-Zamakhshari refers to as the autograph copy, the first, the original, the umm al-Kashshaf' (p. 68). From this, he infers that two copies of the work were circulating during al-Zamakhshari's lifetime (p. 74). Lane speculates that one of these copies was probably the draft version of the final manuscript, which--either in al-Zamakhshari's lifetime or after--ended up in Abu Hanifa's tomb-shrine in Baghdad. As he says, "The existence of two originals, both of which had the epilogue but only one of which had the postscript, would go a long way to explain why 92.7% of the relevant manuscripts had the epilogue (i.e., 102 MSS.) while only 7.3% did not (i.e., 8 MSS); and why, of the 102 manuscripts that did...