The Tafsīr
Niasse, the West African exegetical tradition, and the two commentaries he read alongside it
Editorial Conventions
Digitisation, footnote markers, verse ranges, transliteration, and the translation choices
Digital Edition & Research Platform
This site presents two interconnected resources in one: a digital edition and a research platform for Fī Riyāḍ Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-Karīm by Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975), designed to make this tafsīr accessible, searchable, and analytically usable for academic research. It presents the Arabic text of all 56 sessions alongside English for Lessons 1–5 — 2 of them complete and reviewed against the Arabic, the rest in draft or breaking off partway, each saying where it stops. Tafsīr al-Jalālayn and Rūḥ al-Bayān run alongside it verse by verse for al-Fātiḥa (Lesson 1); the remaining sūras are still being transcribed.
What the research tools are, and what each is for, is listed on the Research page rather than duplicated here. A verse concordance and a scholar/source index are being held back while a companion article is under preparation for Islamic Africa (Brill).
The Arabic Edition Behind It
The Arabic text is drawn from the revised ten-volume compiled edition of Muḥammad ibn Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh al-Tijānī al-Ibrāhīmī, who transcribed, verified, and annotated the tafsīr from the original cassette recordings of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse's oral delivery in Arabic in 1383 AH (c. 1963–64), with editorial corrections made for this digital edition.
The revised ten-volume edition is a substantially expanded recension of the earlier six-volume compilation. It carries a more extensive apparatus with a greater number of annotated footnotes, and draws on a broader consultation of the original audio recordings to achieve a more accurate transcription of the oral delivery. The compiler acknowledges the difficulty of transcribing speech: the density of pronominal reference, the rapid movement of inflection, and the gap between spoken expression and written text. He undertook the work out of concern that the recordings, scattered among the khalīfas and companions of the Shaykh, might be lost.
The apparatus is one of the defining achievements of the compiled edition. The hadith citations alone number more than six thousand, traced to their canonical sources across the ṣaḥīḥayn, the Sunan collections, and the wider hadith literature. Beyond hadith, the footnotes engage the major tafsīr works (Ibn Kathīr, al-Qurṭubī, al-Ṭabarī, the Jalālayn, Rūḥ al-Bayān), theological and Sufi sources (al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī), and linguistic and rhetorical literature. This platform presents 324 of these footnotes, spanning 7 of 56 lessons, in a searchable index classified by scholar, genre and lesson — browse it here.
Volume Catalogue
The ten-volume Arabic edition — lessons and sūra coverage
Al-Istiʿādha · al-Fātiḥa – al-Baqara (Q. 1:1–2:252)
Al-Baqara – Al-Nisāʾ (Q. 2:253–4:147)
Al-Nisāʾ – Al-Aʿrāf (Q. 4:148–7:170)
Al-Aʿrāf – Hūd (Q. 7:171–11:83)
Hūd – Al-Naḥl (Q. 11:84–17:111)
Al-Kahf – Al-Nūr
Al-Nūr – Al-Aḥzāb
Al-Aḥzāb – Al-Dukhān
Al-Dukhān – Al-Ṣaff
Al-Jumuʿa – Al-Nās
The Print Bilingual Edition
The complete bilingual print edition (Arabic facing English) is under contract for publication. It differs from the Arabic compiled edition in its organisation: rather than following the ten-volume structure of the Arabic edition, the print bilingual edition is organised around the seven manzils, the daily recitation portions that Shaykh Ibrāhīm himself enumerated in verse and practised as a weekly cycle of Qurʾānic recitation.
This seven-volume structure, each volume corresponding to one manzil, reflects the Shaykh's own relationship to the Qurʾān and provides a framework for the translation that is rooted in his practice rather than in the conventions of the printed Arabic edition.
The Qurʾānic Text and Audio
The Qurʾānic text follows the Warsh ʿan Nāfiʿ rasm, the orthographic standard of North and West Africa in which the tafsīr was delivered, and differs in certain orthographic details from the Ḥafṣ rasm more familiar to readers outside this tradition. Qurʾānic audio is the recitation of Maḥmūd Khalīl al-Ḥuṣarī (1917–1980) in the Warsh riwāya, given verse by verse, for Sūras 1–18 so far. Recordings of Shaykh Ibrāhīm's own oral delivery are available for 30 of the 56 sessions in Arabic, with further sessions forthcoming, and for the complete Wolof tafsīr (122 sessions, via the Internet Archive); see the Listen page.
Who Made It
Amadu Kunateh is a PhD candidate in Philosophy of Religion and African Studies at Harvard University. He conceived, built, and maintains this edition, and is its sole translator; the digitisation, proofreading, structural design and scholarly annotation are his. The work belongs to doctoral research on Niasse's tafsīr conducted since 2022 across both the six-volume compilation and the revised ten-volume recension.
Two contributions here are not present in the printed Arabic edition. The apparatus has been classified by subject genre — Hadith Sciences, Tafsīr, Theology, Sufism, Fiqh, Linguistics, History — which the printed text does not do. And the technical vocabulary is presented as a structured set of typed relations between terms — hierarchies, conditions, dyads, spiritual progressions — each drawn from a passage in the commentary and cited to it; see Technical Terms.
A third, the Scholar Index, maps Niasse's intellectual interlocutors — the figures he names, invokes, and positions himself in relation to within his own oral commentary — as distinct from the compiler's documentation of his sources. It answers the question with whom does Niasse think? No printed edition of this tafsīr undertakes that mapping. It is withheld from the site pending the companion article.
His dissertation, Leaders of Knowledge: Tafsīr, Philosophical-Theology, and the Remapping of Islamic Thought in West Africa (expected 2027), is the first sustained, book-length treatment of Fī Riyāḍ Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-Karīm. It investigates the theology (Who is God?), anthropology (Who is the human being?), and cosmology (What is the cosmos?) of the tafsīr.
Ally Mahmoud, web development review.
Dayyib Bashir Sheikh Dahir, Arabic textual verification and proofreading.
Kabir Aliyu Sheikh Dahir, Arabic textual verification and proofreading.
How to Cite
Ibrāhīm Niasse, Fī Riyāḍ Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-Karīm, comp. Muḥammad ibn Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh al-Tijānī al-Ibrāhīmī, rev. 10-vol. ed. (n.p., n.d.). Digital bilingual ed., ed. Amadu Kunateh (ORCID: 0009-0002-7839-6474). niassetafsir.org, 2025. Edition 1.0.
A DOI will be assigned on publication to Zenodo and will appear here when available. Any passage you save on this site carries its own citation; see Saved.
Copyright
Arabic edition © Muḥammad ibn Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh al-Tijānī al-Ibrāhīmī. English translation © Amadu Kunateh. All rights reserved. Scholarly quotation with full citation is permitted. Reproduction, redistribution, or commercial use without written permission is prohibited.