Ṣūfī tafsīr Reconsidered: Exploring the Development of a Genre

Ṣūfī tafsīr on the Qur'an is widely accepted as a distinct scholarly or literary genre within the wider field of Islamic scholarship. Ṣūfī writers frequently describe themselves as participating within an identifiable tradition when they write commentaries on the Qur'an, and over the last century a number of scholars – writing from within the Muslim tradition and without – not only have accepted the notion of a millennium-long genre of Ṣūfī tafsīr, but also have sought to define and catalogue it. This paper explores and challenges such assumptions through a direct examination of examples of premodern Ṣūfī tafsīr literature, looking beyond the assumption that the Ṣūfī belief in multiple levels of meaning and existence necessarily impart an esoteric meaning to all writing on the Qur'an by Ṣūfīs. My purpose is to question the efficacy of thinking of Ṣūfī tafsīr as a genre, sui generis, by analysing the modern academic tradition of categorising Ṣūfī commentaries on the Qur'an in the light of writings by prominent Ṣūfīs, demonstrating how such works of commentary seem to contradict conventional wisdom concerning the existence of such a formal genre.