IBN qutaybah's Contribution to Cur'anic Exegesis

xiii INTRODUCTION The present study deals with Ibn Qutaybah’s (213-276/828-889) contribution to Qur’ānic exegesis in the third/ninth century, focusing on and analysing his work Ta’wīl Mushkil al-Qur’ān (The Interpretation of the Difficult Passages of the Qur’ān). The book was a treatise on Qur’ānic rhetoric and on the inimitability of the Qur’ān, where he clarified through philological explanations a number of Qur’ānic verses assumed to be obscure by his opponents among the sceptics. It was intended to defend the Qur’ān against the attack of philosophic scepticism. There have been several attempts by contemporary scholars to study Ibn Qutaybah’s works and ideas, such as G. Lecomte, I. M. H . usaynī, Ch. Péllat and M. Z. Sallām. Lecomte and Sallām deal with Ibn Qutaybah’s Ta’wīl in their respective works Ibn Qutayba (mort en 276/889: l'homme, son oevre, ses idées and Athar al-Qur’ān fī Tat . awwur al-Naqd al-Adabī as well as the latter’s work Ibn Qutaybah. Ch. Péllat in his work Ibn Qutaybah wa al-Thaqāfah al-‘Arabīyah in the Taha Husayn Memorial Volume deals with Ibn Qutaybah’s view of Arabic culture; similarly, J. Wansbrough in his work Qur’ānic Studies briefly mentions the significance of the Ta’wīl, also without going into the details of it. A rather comprehensive study of this book is necessary in order to assess Ibn Qutaybah’s contribution to Qur’ānic exegesis. The study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter deals with the sources and the historical background. The sources consist of Ibn Qutaybah’s works necessary for my research and books on Qur’ānic exegesis, Arabic language and literature. The historical background consists of a short synopsis of Ibn Qutaybah’s life and a historical perspective on the development of early Qur’ānic exegesis until the end of the third/ninth century and a brief account on later periods. An extended biography of Ibn Qutaybah will not be given here, since it has been done by Lecomte and H . usaynī in Ibn Qutayba and The Life and Works of Ibn Qutayba respectively. The second chapter of this study deals with Ibn Qutaybah’s refutation of allegations of grammatical error, contradiction and obscurity in the verses of the Qur’ān. His interpretation of the "seven letters" in the h . adīth: "The Qur’ān was revealed in seven letters" which is different from that of other scholars, and his view of mutashābihāt (ambiguous verses), two of the main issues of his time, are also given in this chapter. The third chapter deals with Ibn Qutaybah’s treatment of the