Tafseer Usool at-Tafseer

chapters. This cannot be said about the Gospel of Prophet Jesus (r), nor the books
of the Old Testament attributed to earlier prophets, nor any other scripture
revealed by Allaah. However, Allaah’s protection of the Qur’aan did not stop
there; He also safeguarded the original meaning. If the protection of the Qur’aan’s
meaning had not taken place, deviants would have turned the Book of Allaah into
a jumble of symbols, riddles and codes open to a multiplicity of interpretations,
and its original meaning would have been lost. Allaah preserved the meaning of
the Qur’aan by explaining some of its generalities within the Qur’aan itself and by
entrusting the tafseer of the remainder to His Messenger, Muhammad ibn
Abdillaah (r) (570-632 CE).
The sahaabah (companions) were taught to seek their understanding of the
Qur’aan first from the Qur’aan itself, then from the explanations and applications
of the Prophet (r) and from their own intimate understanding of the language of
the Qur’aan. After the Prophet’s death, those who entered Islaam as new converts
depended first upon the Qur’aan to explain itself, then they depended on the
sahaabah to explain the Qur’aan to them. The sahaabah would inform their
students among the taabi‘oon of the circumstances in which the verses were
revealed, the interpretation given by the Prophet’s statements and his actions, and
finally they would explain the meanings of some words which may not have been
familiar or which may have had a different meaning to Arabs outside of the
Arabian Peninsula. With the passing of the era of the sahaabah, the scholars
among the taabi‘oon shouldered the grave respon-sibility of conveying the
original meanings of the Qur’aan to the next generation of Muslims exactly as
they had received them. It was the third generation after the Prophet (r) which
began the process of gathering and recording the various narrations of tafseer
from the taabi‘oon.
From the above-mentioned methodology of the Prophet (r) and his
companions and that of the early generations of Muslim scholars which followed
them, the following steps have been deduced by orthodox scholars as being the
necessary conditions for making correct tafseer of the Qur’aan:
1. Tafseer of Qur’aan by Qur’aan
There are many places in the Qur’aan where questions are asked in order to
catch the mind of the reader and subsequently answered to increase the impact of
the concept in question. In other places, general statements are made and then
later explained in order to vary the modes of presentation and encourage readers
and listeners to reflect more. This self-explanatory process is referred to as tafseer