Rethinking Mu‘tazilite tafsīr: from essence to history

It has been common to approach the history of the interpretation of the Qur’ān (tafsīr) through the study of different traditions or ‘schools’ of tafsīr. These ‘schools’ usually correspond to various Islamic intellectual/sectarian traditions and include, among others, the Twelver Shī‘ite, Sunnī, Mu‘tazilite and Ṣūfī tafsīr traditions. An underlying assumption in this division is that each of these traditions developed a distinct approach to the text of the Qur’ān, and that tafsīr works authored by scholars associated with these ‘schools’ fall into recognisable traditions due to the manifestations of this approach in their texts. The ‘school’ framework has been applied in the classical studies on Qur’ānic exegesis and continues to inform both the analysis of the history of Islamic exegesis and studies on individual commentaries on the Qur’ān. Several recent publications, however, revisited this well­established framework. Centred on the fundamental question of ‘what makes an exegetical tradition a tradition?’, they raised a number of related questions concerning the precise characteristics of the various exegetical ‘schools’, the value of this notion for the analysis of individual commentaries on the Qur’ān, and its validity as an analytical tool for understanding the history of Islamic exegesis. This article explores the implications that this critical engagement with the notion of an exegetical ‘school’ has for Mu‘tazilite tafsīr. It shows that the arguments advanced in the course of this engagement are not only fully applicable to the case of Mu‘tazilite tafsīr, they also reveal the limitations of the traditional approach to Mu‘tazilite tafsīr which defines this tradition through reference to a single unique set of characteristics that the commentaries on the Qur’ān written by Mu‘tazilite authors are thought to have. The article highlights some of these limitations, focusing on the exceptionalism and essentialism implied in this approach. It further suggests that the study of Mu‘tazilite tafsīr could benefit from an adaptation of a historical rather than an essentialist framework. This historical framework implies that Mu‘tazilite exegetical tradition is regarded not as a homogeneous and static category, defined by a unique and unchanging ‘essence’, but approached from a historical perspective and seen as changing over time, and interacting with other trends of Islamic exegesis. KCI Citation Count: 0