Q 2:138 in the tafsīr of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse

وَمَنَ مِنَ وَنَحْنُ لَهُۥ

(We take our) colour from Allah, and who is better than Allah at colouring. We are His worshippers — 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-Baqara begins at vol. 1, p. 54 (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 5, ¶67 · numbered by Ḥafṣ · lesson opens at vol. 1, p. 120 · the annual Ramaḍān cycle

الأبيض فيكون أسود، ويصبغون الأبيض فيكون أحمر أو أزرق، كل لون يقدرون أن يصبغوا إليه ولكن عجزوا عن أن يصبغوا أسود فيصير أبيض هذا عجز عنه الصباغون، والله تبارك وتعالى يأخذ قلب الكافر وهو أسود فيصبغه فيصير أبيض بالإيمان ويأخذ الشعر الأسود فيصبغه حتى يصير أبيض بالشيب، الصباغون عجزوا عن هذه الكيفية، فلهذا قال لا أحد أحسن من الله صبغة بل هو أحسن الصابغين صبغة[37] (وَنَحْنُ لَهُ عَبِدُونَ) قال اليهود المسلمين: نحن أهل الكتاب الأول وقبلتنا أقدم ولم تكن الأنبياء من العرب ولو كان محمد نيا لكان منا، النبوة لا تكون إلا في بني إسرائيل ولم يأت نبي عربيا هذا ما عرفناه وقُلَ)

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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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