Tafsir & Translation

Understand the Quran you read and hear every week

Lessons in this course (6)

What tafsir is — and what it is not — Classical method explains the Quran in ranked layers: first by the Quran itself (one ayah unpacking another), then by the Sunnah (the Prophet ﷺ acting out and e…
Reading one ayah deeply: the method — The deep-read this course trains: (1) read the ayah and its neighbours in Arabic and translation; (2) place it — what is the surah doing here, Makki or Madani, …
The tafsir library: who wrote what, and how to use each — At-Tabari (d. 310 AH) is the great collector: narration-based, quoting the early community with chains, laying opinions side by side. Ibn Kathir (d. 774 AH) is …
Context is a guardrail: occasions, place, and sequence — Many ayat came in answer to a moment — a question asked, an accusation made, a treaty broken. These reports, asbab an-nuzul, are collected in works like al-Wahi…
The Quran explaining the Quran — The scholars rank the ways of explaining the Quran, and the first is the Quran itself: what is stated briefly in one place is expanded in another. Ibn Kathir's …
Israʾiliyyat and weak reports in tafsir — Classical tafsirs sometimes carry narratives from Jewish and Christian sources — israʾiliyyat — usually filling in details the Quran omits: names, numbers, what…