Q 103:1 in the tafsīr of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse

By the declining day Pickthall

Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975) read the whole Qurʾān aloud at Medina Baye over fifty-six sessions between ẓuhr and ʿaṣr in Ramaḍān 1383/1964, and his students wrote those sessions down as Fī Riyāḍ al-Tafsīr. He comes back to the same āya elsewhere — in the fatwās, the Ḥikam, the poetry — decades apart. About the tafsīr →

In the printed edition: Sūrat Al-ʿAṣr begins at vol. 10, p. 209 (Tūnis 2022, 10 vols.)

The āya above is Warsh ʿan Nāfiʿ, the rasm of the printed edition. The root behind each underlined word comes from a Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim corpus, realigned to this Warsh text word by word; 125 of the 6,236 āyāt differ in word count between the two riwāyāt, and those were aligned rather than assumed. A word carries no underline where the corpus supplies no root. Lexicon entries are a reading aid and carry no page reference; the edition does not cite them. Page references elsewhere on this site follow the ten-volume Tunis 2022 printing this site was transcribed from; published scholarship on this text cites the six-volume Tunis 2010 printing, whose pagination is different.

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Exegesis of the verse

Sustained interpretation of the verse as a verse — lemma, gloss, expansion.

Fī riyāḍ al-tafsīr li-l-Qurʾān al-karīm

في رياض التفسير للقرآن الكريمtafsīr

1383 / 1964 · Arabic · Lesson 55 — vol. 10, p. 167 · numbered by Ḥafṣ · Muḥammad b. al-Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh al-Tijānī · the annual Ramaḍān cycle

In this session, not yet located. Lesson 55 is titled by sūra rather than by āya; its bounds (Q 87:1–Q 111:5) are inferred from where the neighbouring sessions begin, so they are soft at the edges. Of the 273 āyāt in that span, as many as 88 are quoted in the transcription; this one is not among them, so whether he comments on it is not established. The page given is where the lesson opens — start there and read on.

Most of Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s Qurʾānic commentary is oral. Sixty-two cassettes of Wolof exegesis covering the whole Qurʾān have never been transcribed, and this index reaches only what the written sessions quote. An absence here belongs to the index, not to the corpus.

Read Lesson 55

Read in the school

Not Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s words. Students and successors reading the same verse — kept below and apart, because a school’s reading is evidence of transmission, not of what the master said.

al-Qanābil al-yadawiyya fī l-dhabb ʿan ṭarīq al-ṣūfiyya

Muḥammad al-Mishrīالقنابل اليدوية في الذب عن طريق الصوفيةtafsīr

rev. July 2018 · Arabic · Question 19 · tr. Saʿīd Simone Nardella & Adnan Wood-Smith · answered in writing

However, the starting point of true taqwa of Allah is the qutbs’ endpoint, and the qutbs’ endpoint is the maqam of the Prophet (s.a.w.s.). May Allah make us and all of you from among those who believe in him and gather with him in the Dunya and the Akhirah. Question 19: For the people of haqiqah, what is subtly indicated by His speech, “by Asr” (Qur’an 103:1)?

Muḥammad al-Mishrī, not Shaykh Ibrāhīm — the school reading, in a responsum. Question 19.

Entries are grouped by what Shaykh Ibrāhīm is doing with the verse, then ordered oldest first inside each group, so the same words can be seen carrying different work across a career. Every entry names the witness it comes from and how well attested the attribution is. Loci that are known but not yet available are listed rather than hidden. Beyond Fī Riyāḍ al-Tafsīr, 156 āyāt have so far been indexed from his other writings — the Ḥikam, the fatwās, Kāshif al-Ilbās, theQanābīl, the Tafsīr Maʿānī cassettes. A verse with nothing under this heading has not been searched in them and found wanting; it has not been searched.

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