IBN ‘ASHUR is Muhammad Tahir ibn ‘Ashur, born in Tunis in 1296/1879. He lived a very active life, serving as a Maliki judge, professor, and rector of the renowned Zaytuna University. His professional commitments did not hinder his prolific pen from producing over forty works on Arabic rhetoric (balagha), oratory, jurisprudence, history, hadith commentary, Sufism, and ancient medicine; all of them eclipsed by his tremendous thirtyvolume Quranic exegesis Tahrir al-ma’na al-sadid wa tanwir al-‘aql al-Jadid min Tafsir alKitab al-Majid [Verifying the true meaning and illuminating the modern mind through expositing the Glorious Book], which reflects its author’s wide familiarity with modern science and addresses deep questions of exegesis unanswered by others before. It has the most sustained and comprehensive application of the rules of rhetoric to the Quran of any work of tafsir, verse by verse; with special emphasis on the ways that coordinating conjunctions affect the sense of the text, distinguishing between the meanings yielded by disjunction and conjunction (fasl wa wasl) everywhere. His lexical investigation of derivations and meanings of terms is painstaking, accurate, and thorough; while his sense of the arrangement and interrelation of suras, verses, and thematic components is surpassed by few. Though he cites some twenty-five exegetical authorities regularly throughout his tafsir, his command of Zamakhshari and Baydawi and all their key commentaries is especially deft,
and spends upon the magisterial authority of his work, upon the correctness of his choices between valid interpretive possibilities of the Arabic raised by his predecessors, and upon his critiques of those he finds weak. The work imposes itself on anyone who hopes to understand the Quran after him. His public service brought him into contact with heads of state, and it is related that when President Bourguiba proposed that Tunisians abandon fasting the month of Ramadan in the name of national productivity and asked him to speak to the populace to reassure them, he agreed, and gave a live address over the airwaves citing some verses on the matter, concluding that “Allah has told the truth, and Bourguiba a falsehood.” He was summarily dismissed from office, but gained time to finish his tafsir, which he completed in 1960 after a total of thirty-nine years, at the age of eighty-three. He died thirteen years later and was laid to rest in Tunis in 1393/1973 (al-A’lam (67), 6.174; A’lam Tunisiyyun (66), 361- 67; Tafsir al-Tahrir wa al-tanwir (15), 30.636; and Tarajim al-mu’allifin al-Tunisiyyin (32), 3.304-9).