Q 16:8 in the tafsīr of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse

مَا لَا

And horses and mules and asses (hath He created) that ye may ride them, and for ornament. And He createth that which ye know not — 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-Naḥl begins at vol. 5, p. 124 (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.

loci in the corpus

distinct acts

2 of 2

text available

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 29, ¶95 · numbered by Ḥafṣ · lesson opens at vol. 5, p. 100 · the annual Ramaḍān cycle

من مكة إلى المدينة وناقته العضباء، والجدعاء وهذه أسماء، ليست صفات، إنما سميت بذلك فقط 1. والرسول صلى اللّٰه عليه وسلم كان يملك من الغنم مائة شاة2 ولم يملك البقر (وَالْخَيْلَ وَالْبِغَالَ وَالْحَمِيرَ لِتَرْكَبُوهَا وَزِينَةً ) خلق لكم الخيل وخلق لكم البغال والحمير لتركبوها وزينة. الخيل مراكب أولي العزم من الرسل، والحمير والإبل مراكب محمد صلى اللّٰه عليه وسلم وصالح وهود وإبراهيم ركبوا الإبل، والحمير مراكب عزير وعيسى عليه الصلاة

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The verse used, not interpreted

Here the verse warrants a claim argued from other authorities. It is not the object of commentary.

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

في رياض التفسير للقرآن الكريمproof-textunbracketed quotation

1383 / 1964 · Arabic · Lesson 16, ¶15 · numbered by Ḥafṣ · lesson opens at vol. 3, p. 122 · the annual Ramaḍān cycle

قال الله "سَأُوْرِيكُمْ دَارَ الْعَسِفِينَ" هذه باريس. «مَا بَرَّطْنَا مِ الْكِتَبِ مِ شَيءٍ ( ثَمَّ إِلَىٰ رَبِّهِمْ يُحْشَرُونَ) فيقضى بينهم ويقتص للجماء من القرناء[4]. سئل الشافعي عن هذه السفن البحرية والبرية من أين ذكرها في القرآن؟ قال الشافعي: "وَالْخَيْلَ وَالْبِغَالَ وَالْحَمِيرَ لِتَرْكَبُوهَا وَزِينَةٌ وَيَخْلُقُ مَا لا تَعْلَمُونَ" إن هذه السفائن كلا دخلت في "وَيَخْلُقُ مَا لاَ تَعْلَمُونٌ". سُعلتُ عن هذه المسألة في المدينة، ذكرت لهم جواب الشافعي وقلت لهم: وأنا أرى جوابا ثانيا

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Lesson 16 runs Q 6:36–Q 6:110. This āya falls outside it. He quotes it here inside the commentary on another verse, which is why it is not filed as exegesis of this one.

The printing brackets no quotation here. A run of consecutive words in this paragraph — three at the shortest — occurs in one place in the muṣḥaf and nowhere else, and every āya lying inside that run is credited, so a run crossing a boundary attests both. Matching folds together the letter shapes the scan confuses, so the words need not stand in the āya exactly as printed.

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 الصوفيةproof-text

rev. July 2018 · Arabic · Question 16 · tr. Saʿīd Simone Nardella & Adnan Wood-Smith · answered in writing

Until they reached fana’ in him and lost themselves Now I have said something whose meaning is distant, and Allah knows best where Ibrahim is and what Ibrahim is…The one being asked about it has no more knowledge than the one asking, 7 nor is he like him, nor close to him, nor with him in any da’irah. “He creates what you know not” (Qur’an 16:8), “It rests on Allah to show the right way” (Qur’an 16:9)…O Allah, “Guide us to the straight path” (Qur’an 1:6).

Muḥammad al-Mishrī, not Shaykh Ibrāhīm — the school reading, in a responsum. Question 16.

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. Passages 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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