وَإِن عَلَيْكَ فَإِنِ أَن فِے أَوْ فِے وَلَوْ عَلَي فَلَا مِنَ
And if their aversion is grievous unto thee, then, if thou canst, seek a way down into the earth or a ladder unto the sky that thou mayst bring unto them a portent (to convince them all)! - If Allah willed, He could have brought them all together to the guidance - So be not thou among the foolish ones — 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-Anʿām begins at vol. 3, p. 112 (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.
Sustained interpretation of the verse as a verse — lemma, gloss, expansion.
1383 / 1964 · Arabic · Lesson 15, ¶136 · numbered by Ḥafṣ · lesson opens at vol. 3, p. 84 · the annual Ramaḍān cycle
(وَان كَانَ كَبْرَ) عظم ( عَلَيْكَ إِعْرَاضهُمْ عن الإسلام لحرصك عليهم ( جَاب إسْتَطَعْتَ أن تَمْتَغِى نَمَفا٣ سربا ب الأَرْضِ أَوْ سلَّما مصعدا فى السَّمَاءِ قَتَاتِمَهُم بِئَايَةِ ) مما اقترحوا
Read in context →Here the verse warrants a claim argued from other authorities. It is not the object of commentary.
1383 / 1964 · Arabic · Lesson 16, ¶6 · numbered by Ḥafṣ · lesson opens at vol. 3, p. 122 · the annual Ramaḍān cycle
واللّه تبارك وتعالى يهدي من يشاء ويضل من يشاء قال "وَلَوْ شَآءَ رَبُّكَ لِآَمَنَ مَن فِي الاَرْضِ كَلَّهُمْ جَبِيعاً، "وَلَوْ شَآءَ اللَّهُ لَجَمَعَهُمْ عَلَى ألْهَدِى" إذا هو أراد في الأزل أن قسما من عباده يهديهم إلى الجنة - جعلنا اللّٰه وإياكم منهم - وقسما لا يهديهم فيشْقون ويذهبون إلى
Read in context →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.
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.