Tafsir al-Razi on Surah al-Fatiha

The claim itself (p. 11)

اعلم أنه مر على لساني في بعض الأوقات أن هذه السورة الكريمة يمكن أن يستنبط من فوائدها ونفائسها عشرة آلاف مسئلة

“It passed upon my tongue at some point that ten thousand masail (مسائل) can be derived from the benefits and treasures of this noble surah.” Some enviers and people of obstinacy found the claim absurd, so al-Razi (الرازي) wrote this muqaddima (مقدمة) to show it is “a matter possible to attain, near at hand”. The volume is structured as a muqaddima in chapters followed by kutub (كتب).

Aʿudhu billah (أعوذ بالله): refuge as a curriculum (p. 12)

Seeking refuge covers everything prohibited, in belief and in act. For beliefs he cites the famous hadith (حديث) of the seventy-three sects; each misguided sect errs not in one issue but across the essence, attributes, acts and names of God, jabr (الجبر) and qadar (القدر), the resurrection (المعاد), promise and threat (الوعد والوعيد), rulings and imama (الإمامة), and the Khariji-type (الخوارج) sects alone approach seven hundred. Since seeking refuge from a thing requires knowing it and knowing its falsehood with proof, the istiʿadha (الاستعاذة) alone contains thousands of certain masail (مسائل); adding every act prohibited in the Quran, the mutawatir (متواتر) and ahad (آحاد) reports, ijma (إجماع) and sound qiyas (قياس), this one phrase holds ten thousand masail or more.

Bismillah (بسم الله): the thousand and one names (p. 13)

Two lines of inquiry. First, the well-known position that Allah (الله) has a thousand and one sacred names in the Kitab (الكتاب) and Sunna (السنة); each is a lofty masala (مسئلة), and knowing a name requires knowing the named (المسمى), its proofs, and the answers to doubts (شبهات). Second, the ba of ilsaq (باء الإلصاق) attaches to an implied verb (“with the name of Allah I begin the acts of obedience”), which is only fully known after knowing the divisions of obedience (الطاعات). A latifa (لطيفة): aʿudhu billah (أعوذ بالله) points to negating all that should not be; bismillah (بسم الله) points to affirming all that should be: an ordering to which sound reason testifies.

Al-hamdu lillah (الحمد لله): a thousand thousand masail (p. 14)

Hamd (حمد) is for blessing (نعمة), and hamd for a blessing requires knowing it, but the blessings are beyond counting: Ibrahim 14:34. One example: the human body, in which the anatomists (أصحاب التشريح) found nearly five thousand kinds of benefit, and what their books record beside what they missed is a drop against the ocean. Add the Arsh (العرش), the Kursi (الكرسي), the layered heavens, the fixed stars and planets (الثوابت والسيارات), then the elements (الأمهات) and the three kingdoms (المواليد الثلاثة): “a thousand thousand masail (ألف ألف مسئلة)”, and most of it created for man: al-Jathiya 45:13.

Rabb al-alamin (رب العالمين): a thousand thousand worlds (pp. 14-15)

Knowing Him as Rabb (رب) of al-alamin (العالمين) requires knowing al-alamin: everything other than Allah (الله): spatial things (المتحيزات), immaterial things (المفارقات), and attributes (الصفات). Nothing restricts existence to this world: there is endless void (خلاء) beyond it, and Allah has power over all possibles, “so He is able to create a thousand thousand worlds (ألف ألف عالم) beyond this world, each greater than this world with its own Arsh (عرش) and Kursi (كرسي), heavens and earths, sun and moon; and the philosophers’ (الفلاسفة) proofs that the world is one are feeble, built on flimsy premises.” Even within this earth a lifetime runs out on the wonders of minerals, plants and animals before reaching their depths: Luqman 31:27.

Al-Rahman al-Rahim (الرحمن الرحيم): mercy past counting, and Galen’s (جالينوس) dream (p. 15)

Mercy (رحمة) is deliverance from every harm (آفة) and the conveying of good to those in need; its categories are countless (he points to medicine: the diseases possible in every organ, and the guidance of minds to remedies: “a sea without shore”). Here he tells of Galen (جالينوس): having written on the benefits of the eye’s parts, Galen saw in a dream an angel descend saying: “O Galen, your God says: why have you been stingy toward My servants with the mention of My wisdom?”, so he wrote another book; and a dream instructed his own cure by bloodletting from the vein between the little and ring fingers. Most principles of medicine, al-Razi (الرازي) notes, end at such inspirations (إلهامات).

Malik yawm al-din (مالك يوم الدين): the traveler and the ranks of the return (pp. 15-16)

Man is a traveler: his years are leagues (فراسخ), his months miles (أميال), his breaths steps (خطوات), and his destination the world of the akhira (الآخرة). This phrase points to the masail (مسائل) of the return (المعاد): the purely rational (the soul’s essence جوهر النفس, its survival, its felicity and misery, God’s power to restore: nearly five hundred precise masail) and the transmitted (سمعيات), in three ranks: the signs before the qiyama (القيامة), the states at the qiyama itself (the Trumpet الصور, the death of creatures, the wrecking of heavens and stars), and the states after it (the standing, the reckoning الحساب, the weighing of deeds وزن الأعمال, the two parties, and the abodes). Thousands of masail, all under this phrase.

Iyyaka naʿbudu wa iyyaka nastaʿin (إياك نعبد وإياك نستعين): all of law and all of the heart (pp. 16-17)

Worship (عبادة) presupposes proof of one God, powerful over endless objects, knowing endless objects, free of need, who commands and prohibits. The phrase’s requirements pull in the full detailing of the takalif (تكاليف): all of fiqh (فقه), the laws (شرائع) revealed to previous prophets, and the laws the angels bear; the duties of the limbs (أعمال الجوارح) fill the fiqh books, and the duties of the hearts (أعمال القلوب), “greater, mightier and more majestic”, fill the books of akhlaq (أخلاق). The masail (مسائل) of this ayah are “like the encompassing ocean: minds reach only a little of it”.

Ihdina al-sirat al-mustaqim (اهدنا الصراط المستقيم): the two roads of guidance (p. 17)

Guidance (هداية) is sought by proof (الدليل والحجة) or by purification and discipline (تصفية الباطن والرياضة). The roads of proof are infinite, “for there is not an atom (ذرة) of the upper and lower worlds but that it witnesses to His perfection”; he quotes his father Diya al-Din Umar (ضياء الدين عمر): in every single atom (جوهر فرد) there are infinite kinds of proofs of the Power, Wisdom and Mercy, since each atom could occupy infinite alternative positions and bear infinite alternative attributes. And the road of purification is a sea without shore: every traveler to Allah (الله) has his own manhaj (منهج) and mashrab (مشرب): al-Baqarah 2:148.

The verdict: ten thousand was an understatement (p. 18)

وأن قول من يقول هذه السورة مشتملة على عشرة آلاف مسئلة ، كلام خرج على ما يليق بأفهام السامعين

Whoever grasps the above sees that the surah’s inquiries have no end, and that “the statement that this surah contains ten thousand masail (مسائل) is speech measured down to fit the understanding of the listeners.”

The descent

From the specific words (a mudariʿ verb الفعل المضارع, the ba of ilsaq باء الإلصاق, the name Allah الله) to noun, verb and particle (الاسم والفعل والحرف) and their definitions; to the genus “word” (الكلمة) and its sister-terms; to sounds and letters (الأصوات والحروف), the breath (النفس), the heart and lungs, the diaphragm (الحجاب) as “the first principle of the movement of sound”, and the articulation points (مخارج الحروف), completing only with anatomy (علم التشريح); to sensed qualities as a class; to the category of quality (مقولة الكيف); to accident (العرض); to possible and necessary (الممكن والواجب) under the existent (الموجود); and finally to the knowable (المعلوم) as such, closing with the paradox that the opposite of the known must be known to be judged its opposite.

The conclusion

واعلم أن من اعتبر هذه المراتب العشرة في كل جزء من جزئيات الموجودات فقد انفتحت عليه أبواب مباحث لا نهاية لها

“Whoever considers these ten levels in every particular existent finds doors of inquiry without end opened before him, and his mind cannot encompass the least of them. By this appears how many sciences are derived from few words.”

The permutation method, with its combinatorics (masail 1-2, pp. 21-22)

The most complete way of defining words is derivation (اشتقاق), minor and major (أصغر وأكبر). The major ishtiqaq subjects a root’s letters to all their permutations (تقاليب) seeking one core meaning. A two-letter word admits two orderings; three letters, six; four letters, twenty-four; five, one hundred and twenty: and he states the general multiplication rule, the factorial recursion, in a sixth-century tafsir. The method is only workable in triliterals, “yet what can be had of it is the utmost goal in verifying speech”.

The roots analyzed (masail 3-9, pp. 22-25)

K-L-M (ك ل م) in all orderings conveys strength and intensity (القوة والشدة): kalam (كلام) strikes hearing and affects the mind; kalm (كلم) is wounding; kamal (كمال), lakm (لكم) and malaka (ملك) follow. Q-W-L (ق و ل) conveys movement and lightness (الحركة والخفة) across all six: the wild ass (القلو), parched grain, the ibex’s (الوقل) climb, the variant reading of al-Nur 24:15, butter (اللوقة), the eagle (اللقوة). L-GH-W (ل غ و) conveys total immersion (الامعان والخوض التام): Ibn Jinni (ابن جني) ran kalima and qawl but not lugha (لغة), “so let us consider it here”. Lafz (لفظ) is “throwing” (الرمي): the letters arise at the ejection of breath, a majaz (مجاز) al-Razi (الرازي) flags as his own conjecture. ʿIbara (عبارة) is crossing (العبور والانتقال): meaning crosses from the speaker’s mind to the hearer’s, as the tear (عبرة) crosses the eye and the ferry (معبر) the river.

Is one word already speech? The divorce-oath test (masail 10-12, pp. 25-26)

Grammarians: kalam (كلام) is only the complete sentence (الجملة المفيدة). Usulis (الأصوليون): even one word is kalam. The dispute has a live fiqh (فقه) branch from al-Shaybani’s (محمد بن الحسن الشيباني) al-Jami al-Kabir (الجامع الكبير): a man tells his wife “if I speak to you, you are divorced” (إن كلمتك فأنت طالق), three times over; whether the second utterance itself triggers the first oath turns exactly on whether “speech” covers an incomplete sentence. Abu Hanifa (أبو حنيفة): nothing falls until the full sentence completes; Zufar (زفر): the first words already trigger. Al-Razi (الرازي) reduces the fiqh ruling cleanly to the semantic question, and confines the dispute to that one wording.

Inner speech, kalam al-nafs (كلام النفس) (masala 18, pp. 27-28)

Those who affirm the inner speech argue from al-Munafiqun 63:1: the hypocrites’ (المنافقون) spoken words were outwardly true as a report, so their lie must lie in another speech besides the expression; from Umar’s (عمر) word at Saqifa (السقيفة): “I had composed in my soul a speech, and Abu Bakr (أبو بكر) preceded me to it”; and from al-Akhtal’s (الأخطل) line: “speech is in the heart; the tongue is only made a guide to it” (إن الكلام لفي الفؤاد وإنما جعل اللسان على الفؤاد دليلاً).

Definitions, corrections of al-Zamakhshari (الزمخشري) and Ibn Sina (ابن سينا) (masail 21-27, pp. 28-30)

Al-Zamakhshari’s (الزمخشري) definition of the kalima (كلمة) fails on the past-tense verb, which signifies an event and a time together; the error came from making “single” qualify the meaning instead of the expression. Against defining the word by “sound” (صوت), al-Razi (الرازي) gives a cleaner reason than Ibn Sina’s (ابن سينا): sound is a remote genus, expression (لفظ) the proximate one, and definitions take the proximate genus. Against the Mutazili (المعتزلة) two-letter condition stand the single-letter imperatives of waqa (وقى) and waʿa (وعى). The preferred formula: everything uttered that conveys by convention (بالوضع) is a kalima, where “uttered” excludes writing and gesture (الخط والإشارة).

What words signify, and where language came from (masail 28-35, pp. 30-31)

Signification is not intrinsic (ليست ذاتية), against Abbad (عباد بن سليمان): it changes across places and times. Some words happen to fit their meanings: the sandgrouse (القطا) named for its cry, and khadm (خضم) versus qadm (قضم) for eating moist versus dry things, “because kha resembles the sound of eating something moist and qaf the sound of eating something dry”. On the origin of language he suspends judgment against both camps: the tawqif (توقيف) proof from al-Baqarah 2:31 may mean inspiration (إلهام), “and perhaps these languages were coined by peoples before Adam (آدم), then Allah taught them to Adam”. And words signify what is in minds, not external things: the rock that becomes a bird that becomes a man as we approach shows the names tracking mental conceptions.

Why language is the best medium, and the cascade from truth to breath (masail 41-42, p. 33)

Words beat writing, gesture and clapping for three reasons: sounds are a free by-product of breath; they perish the moment they exist, arising at need and ceasing with it; and the articulation points (مخارج) times the compositions yield nearly infinite words, one per meaning, without confusion. Then the teleological cascade: man’s perfection is knowing the truth for its own sake and the good for acting on it (معرفة الحق لذاته والخير لأجل العمل به); the soul acquires these only through the body; the body’s welfare needs the heart as a wellspring of innate heat (الحرارة الغريزية); the heat needs ventilation; so the heart was given expansion and contraction (الانبساط والانقباض), and on that respiratory cycle the letters, the words, and speech itself ride. “So glory to the Creator who governs with dazzling wisdom and unending power.”

The great epistemological thesis (masala 50, p. 36)

دلالة الألفاظ على معانيها ظنية

Verbal signification is presumptive (ظنية): it rests on the transmission of language, grammar and morphology (اللغة والنحو والتصريف), first transmitted by individuals, and on the absence of homonymy (اشتراك), majaz (مجاز), semantic shift (نقل), ellipsis (إضمار), particularization (تخصيص), and rational opposer (المعارض العقلي). Believing all these premises is probability, and what rests on the probable is the more probable. Al-Razi (الرازي) plants his famous thesis about scripture-derived language proofs here, at the gate of the whole tafsir.

Sound itself (masail 1-4, pp. 36-37)

Against Ibn Sina (ابن سينا): the essence of sound (الصوت) is known by hearing itself; nothing is clearer than the sensed by which to define it; his formula at best names the cause. In fairness to al-Nazzam (النظام): “he was among the intelligent of mankind; it is far-fetched that he held sound to be a body; the ignorant confused his cause-claim with an identity-claim.” The proximate cause is the undulation of air (تموج الهواء): “not a locomotion from one fixed origin to one fixed end, but a state resembling waves, arising bit by bit, impact after impact and rest after rest”: a recognizably modern picture of propagation.

Stops, continuants and vowels (masail 5-9, pp. 37-38)

The stop letters (ب، ت، د، ط) exist only at the instant (الآن) between the breath’s confinement and release: “they stand to sound as the point to the line and the now to time”, aptly called huruf (حروف), edges. Some prolongable consonants are really successions of instants that sense cannot resolve; others, like sin (س) and shin (ش), genuinely persist. The short vowels (الحركات) are the lower limits of the long vowels (حروف المد واللين), and the consonant must precede its vowel, else circularity (الدور).

Composed speech cannot be eternal (masail 10-14, pp. 38-40)

A word is a word only through the succession of its letters, and the successive is originated (حادث); had the letters occurred all at once, none of the six orderings would be worthier, and no word would form. The resolution: “kalam Allah (كلام الله)” said of the recited letters is majaz (مجاز) for the eternal attribute they indicate; the miracle (معجزة) of Muhammad ﷺ (محمد) is the originated letters, “for the eternal existed before Muhammad ﷺ, so how could it be his miracle?”. Against the Hashwiyya (الحشوية) who make the reciter’s sounds God’s own speech: “this is the very thing the Christians (النصارى) say of the Word dwelling in Isa (عيسى), except that they said it of Isa alone, while these fools have said it of every human from the east to the west.” The Karramiyya’s (الكرامية) “speech is the power over speech” is likewise refuted, and reporting vile speech is excluded from God’s kalam by tanzih (تنزيه), not by falsehood, since reporting that people said falsehoods is itself true.

The use/mention paradox (masail 1-3, pp. 40-41)

The grammarians say the verb (الفعل) cannot be reported about (لا يخبر عنه). Al-Razi (الرازي): when we truly say of daraba (ضرب) “it is a verb”, we have reported about the verb; the statement “the verb cannot be reported about” is itself a report about it, “which is self-contradictory” (متناقض); and whether “verb” names the form or the meaning, either way we just reported about it. “These are hard questions in this station.” Against Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani’s (عبد القاهر الجرجاني) defense of the noun-definition he is equally blunt: “this excuse is weak” (هذا العذر ضعيف).

The definitions and the metaphysics they trigger (masail 5-7, pp. 42-45)

Five definitions of the noun (الاسم) are dissected: al-Zamakhshari’s (الزمخشري) “in itself” (في نفسه) clause fails on every referent of the pronoun. Al-Razi’s (الرازي) verb-definition, “a word indicating the subsistence of the masdar (مصدر) for an unspecified thing in a specified time”, then spawns genuine metaphysics: the creation-regress (if khalaqa (خلق) indicates a khalq subsisting for God, that khalq is either originated, needing another khalq, or eternal, making the world eternal), the wujud-regress (وجود), the paradox of privative verbs like faniya (فني), and the time-in-time regress from “time originated”.

The lexicographer’s firewall, and kana (كان) always complete (p. 45)

اللغوي يكفي في علمه تصور المفهوم ، سواء كان حقاً أو باطلاً

His answer to all the regresses in one line: “for the lexicographer (اللغوي), conceiving the concept suffices, whether it be true or false”: definitions of word-classes concern conceptual content, not metaphysical truth. And his personal doctrine: kana (كان) is always a complete verb (تامة مطلقاً); in “kana Zayd muntaliqan” (كان زيد منطلقاً) its subject is the relational essence “Zayd’s (زيد) being-qualified-by-departure” (موصوفية زيد بالانطلاق), and a relation cannot be mentioned without its relata: “a deep, wondrous, subtle inquiry of which the ancients were heedless.”

The vocative and the sentence without a hidden verb (masail 9-12, pp. 46-47)

The bare verb’s hidden agent dissolves once the form is seen as coined for an agent the speaker is about to mention: before the mention, the speech is incomplete and bears no truth-value. Five differences separate “ya Zayd” (يا زيد) from “unadi Zaydan” (أنادي زيداً), against those who make the vocative particle stand for a verb. And “Zayd fi al-dar” (زيد في الدار) is complete speech needing no implied istaqarra (استقر): “settled in the house” itself contains “in”, so the implied-verb account regresses. The conditional sentence (الجملة الشرطية) is a secondary composition: two complete sentences joined by the shart (شرط) and jaza (جزاء) particles into one.

The three species and what a proper name conveys (pp. 47-48)

If the mere conception of a noun’s meaning precludes sharing, it is a proper name (علم), overt, or pronoun (مضمر), covert; otherwise a genus-name (a determinate quiddity ماهية) or a derived name (“some thing qualified by an attribute”). Against the mutakallimun (المتكلمون) who said the proper name conveys nothing: “it is true it conveys no attribute in the named; but how does it convey nothing, when it identifies that specific essence?” And alam al-jins (علم الجنس) is precisely distinguished from ism al-jins (اسم الجنس): Usama (أسامة) names each individual lion qua itself by lexical homonymy (الاشتراك اللفظي); asad (أسد) names only the shared quiddity.

Names, laqabs (ألقاب) and kunyas (كنى) (p. 49)

The hyena has a name and a kunya (كنية): Hadajir (حضاجر) and Umm Amir (أم عامر), as do the lion: Usama (أسامة) and Abu al-Harith (أبو الحارث), the fox: Thuala (ثعالة) and Abu al-Husayn (أبو الحصين), and the scorpion: Shabwa (شبوة) and Umm Urayt (أم عريط). Kunyas attach through fathers (the wolf Abu Jada أبو جعدة), mothers (calamity Umm Hubukra أم حبوكرى, wine Umm Layla أم ليلى), sons (the crow Ibn Daya ابن دأية), and daughters (the echo “daughter of the mountain” ابنة الجبل, the pebble “daughter of the earth” بنت الأرض). A kunya may state a fact (Abu Talib أبو طالب), a hope (Abu al-Fadl أبو الفضل), its own opposite (Abu Yahya أبو يحيى, “father of He-Lives”, for death), a famous father-son exchange (Yusuf (يوسف) is Abu Yaqub (أبو يعقوب) and Yaqub (يعقوب) is Abu Yusuf (أبو يوسف)), or fame for a trait.

Against universal etymology (p. 51)

فيجب الانتهاء في الاشتقاقات الى أسماء موضوعة جامدة

Derived names presuppose underived roots, else regress or circle: “derivations must terminate at primitive coined names; and by this it appears that the strenuous effort the philologists and grammarians habitually make to render every word derived from something else is a futile endeavor and wasted work” (سعي باطل وعمل ضائع). Among the derived-name rulings: the known (المعلوم) derives from knowledge (العلم) though the knowledge does not subsist in the known thing; and one who leaves unbelief is truly “not an unbeliever” (ليس بكافر), since a derived name holds only while its source persists.

What iʿrab is (masail 1-5, pp. 52-53)

As the word’s substance indicates the quiddity (ماهية), the word’s varying states must indicate the quiddity’s varying states: that is iʿrab (الإعراب). Only nouns deserve it by original coinage, since verbs and particles are themselves accidents (عوارض), and accidents do not take accidents. It sits on the last letter because a word exists only when complete, and the earlier letters are spent distinguishing word-patterns (أوزان). And iʿrab is not the audible vowels (the indeclinables المبنيات have those too) but the word’s intelligible entitlement (استحقاق) to them through the governors (العوامل): “an intelligible requirement, not a sensible one” (حاجة معقولة لا محسوسة).

Nineteen vowels and phonetic fieldwork (masail 7-8, p. 53)

Three pure vowels (فتحة، كسرة، ضمة), six intermediates (بين بين), each satisfied (مشبعة) or unsatisfied: eighteen, plus the snatched (مختلسة) “unknown vowel” (الحركة المجهولة) with which Abu Amr (أبو عمرو) read bariʿikum (بارئكم) in al-Baqarah 2:54. And the inventory is open: Ibn Jinni (ابن جني) could not classify the first vowel of Persian kilid (كليد), and Abu Ali al-Farisi (أبو علي الفارسي) tells of a town whose strange fatha he learned in days and forgot on leaving.

Anatomy of the cases (masail 12-15, pp. 54-55)

The damma (ضمة) is heaviest: it needs both lips and the two firm muscles reaching their ends; the kasra (كسرة) one muscle; the fatha (فتحة) a weak action: “as anatomy proves it, experiment also shows it”, with the note that the people of Azerbaijan (أذربيجان) color their words toward the damma (إشمام الضمة). Even the case-names are articulatory: damm (ضم) is the joining of lips, fath (فتح) the opening of the mouth, and kasr (كسر), jarr (جر) and khafd (خفض) the dragging-down of the lower jaw.

The diptote theory of branchness (masail 21-22, pp. 56-57)

Nine causes prevent full declension (الصرف), and any two suffice. Why? Each cause marks the noun as a “branch” (فرع): properhood (العلمية) presupposes prior knowledge, description (الوصف) branches from the described, the plural from the singular “for multiplicity is a branch of unity”, foreignness (العجمة) because “every people’s speaking its own tongue is the root”. The verb, too, is a branch of the masdar (مصدر). A noun carrying two branch-marks resembles the verb in double branchness, and that resemblance strips it of the tanwin (تنوين) and the kasra (كسرة), as the verb lacks them.