The Subkī brothers

The correspondence was indeed promoted in works by the Subkī family, first by his son Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 773/1372).Footnote ¹⁹ Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Subkī was an important scholar in his own right. Like his father, and brother Tāj al-Dīn, he held multiple teaching and administrative positions, many of which circulated in the family.Footnote ²⁰ Bahāʾ al-Dīn included the exchange between al-Ṣafaḍī and his father in his work on balāgha, ʿArūs al-afrāḥ, one of the most prominent commentaries on the Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ of Jalāl al-Dīn al-Qazwīnī (d. 739/1338), this being a summary of the Miftāḥ al-ʿulūm of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sakkākī (d. 626/1229). Bahāʾ al-Dīn recorded the entirety of the exchange in his commentary, at the end of a section dealing with the use of a noun instead of an expected pronoun.Footnote ²¹ This is a unique addition to the Talkhīṣ commentary tradition because of the family connection. Other major commentaries on that work do not appear to mention this exchange in that section on noun use.

The proximity to his father afforded another special benefit: Bahāʾ al-Dīn ended his transmission by writing that he had copied all of it from the original in his father’s hand (intahā kalām al-wālid wa-min khaṭṭihi naqaltuhu).Footnote ²² Because of this, Bahāʾ al-Dīn’s version of this letter in his ʿArūs contains an addition that is not found elsewhere, namely a few lines in which his father later revisited the subject matter because he had remembered other instances in the Quran with usage related to this topic. Moreover, this addition dates the earlier answer he had written to the third of Dhū al-Qaʿdah 750/1350 in Damascus. This makes it likely that al-Ṣafaḍī had dispatched the letter to Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī around the same time as he had sent the same letter, in Shawwāl 750/1350, to Zayn al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī. Bahāʾ al-Dīn’s recording of the exchange in his commentary was likely a major contributor to its continued popularity.

The exchange between al-Ṣafaḍī and Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī, including a long answer al-Subkī had appended in prose, was also recorded by another of Taqī al-Dīn’s sons, the well-known Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 771/1370). The social multigenerational scholarly connection between the two families is another reason that this exchange specifically was recorded and promoted by the sons. Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī had been friends from childhood with al-Ṣafaḍī, and it was the latter’s influence that aroused in him an interest in adab (wa-bihi raghibtu fī-l-adab). In his younger days, Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī recollected that he used to send what he described as his childish, poorly constructed poetry to al-Ṣafaḍī for him to correct or even re-write (fa-rubbamā waqaʿa lī shiʿr rakīk min naẓm al-ṣibyān fa-katabahu huwa ʿannī idh dhāka).Footnote ²³ Their mutual scholarly relationship would continue as adults; an example of this is that al-Ṣafaḍī copied out and studied with the author Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī his Jamʿ al-jawāmīʿ, an important and popular work of jurisprudential theory that is still studied today. The copy al-Ṣafaḍī made is still extant at MS National Library of Israel Yahuda Ar. 198.Footnote ²⁴ Next to his scribal colophon, al-Ṣafaḍī wrote the following audition (samāʿ) note:

This note is importantFootnote ²⁷ in that it attests to the lessons taking place, and provides information on who read the work, where the lessons took place in Damascus,Footnote ²⁸ and how long the lessons lasted.Footnote ²⁹ It reaffirms the multi-generational relationship between the Ṣafaḍī and Subkī scholarly families, which extended to al-Ṣafaḍī’s two sons and his slave. In so doing, it also provides otherwise elusive information about al-Ṣafaḍī’s family,Footnote ³⁰ as well as furnishing further evidence of the participation of a non-scholarly Turkic class in knowledge activities in this milieu.Footnote ³¹

Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī’s recording this correspondence between his father and al-Ṣafaḍī is another data point affirming the close relationship between the two families. Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī included it in a work he had compiled of a number of his father’s shorter writings and answers to questions he had received, the Fatāwā al-Subkī.Footnote ³² Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī had also been privy to the extra material his brother Bahāʾ al-Dīn had seen at the end of their father’s answer, and included most of it in the Fatāwā. The transmission of the Subkī brothers, however, also contained a notable omission: they did not include a protest their father had originally made about the limitations of poetry. The letter al-Ṣafaḍī had sent him had been in verse, and the medium normally required a response in kind. Unable to properly flesh out his answer in verse, Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī had excused the extensive response in prose he had sent in addition to a response in verse by noting that poetry constrained his ability to respond properly, writing, “This is what God has inspired me to write; but poetry constrains a proper answer” (fa-hādha mā fataḥa Allāhu ʿalayya wa-l-shiʿru yaḍīqu ʿan al-jawāb).Footnote ³³ It is possible that Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī himself had removed the phrase when he revised his personal copy of the letter, perhaps due to its negative implications, leading to the omission of the phrase in the transmission of his sons.

Neither son, writing in two separate genres, would mention that the problem had been sent by al-Ṣafaḍī to other respondents, or that they had provided answers at odds with that of their father. While the Fatāwā al-Subkī would be expected to contain only the father’s writings, nothing would preclude passing mention of the other letters. The same holds even more so for Bahāʾ al-Dīn’s ʿArūs al-afrāḥ, which used the Talkhīṣ as a frame for digressive discussion in the field, as per the norms of commentary writing; this section of the Talkhīṣ, on the use of nouns where pronouns were expected, would have been the ideal location to mention the other letters, assuming he knew of them, since they provided answers more closely aligned with the disciplinary commitments of balāgha than his father’s answer had, namely that there are communicative and not merely syntactic reasons that justify the use of a noun over a pronoun. That the other letters were not mentioned here, intentionally or not, is a trend that continued in various disciplines connected to balāgha in history and facilitated the association of Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī with this problem to the exclusion of others.

Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī and the creation of a new literary category

The letters al-Ṣafaḍī sent, especially the exchange between him and al-Subkī, were also mentioned in the works of the later polymath al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505). Because of al-Suyūṭī’s outsized influence in many Islamic scholarly disciplines, it is unsurprising that he was likely a major vector for the transmission of these exchanges. Here too the priority given to al-Subkī can be discerned. Al-Suyūṭī mentioned only the letter between al-Ṣafaḍī and al-Subkī in his work on language and the Quran called the Muʿtarak,Footnote ³⁴ and did the same in his definitive work on the various Quranic disciplines called the Itqān.Footnote ³⁵ In both works, he included the letter in a subsection on using a noun in the place of a pronoun, part of a larger section on concision and prolixity (al-ījaz wa-l-iṭnāb). In this larger section of both works, al-Suyūṭī also provided communicative reasons that might allow for deviation from the norms of pronoun usage to refer to preceding nouns, some of which had been mentioned by al-Mawṣilī and al-Qaḥfāzī in their respective letters.

However, al-Suyūṭī added a new category that might allow for a deviation from an expected pronoun use towards repeating a noun. This is not for communicative, but for syntactic reasons: a noun might need to be repeated so that grammatically a pronoun can be attached to it because of the syntactic requirements of the phrase. The example al-Suyūṭī gave was the same explanation that al-Subkī had given for the problem of the repeated noun in the verse in question. In this way, the historical creation of an entirely new reason for this norm deviation was due wholly to al-Subkī having made this argument. The other scholars – who had provided reasons in their responses to al-Ṣafaḍī that might have fitted into other communicative categories al-Suyūṭī had detailed – were not mentioned. This is in some respects unexpected, because al-Subkī did not think that the repetition of the noun “folk” was properly an instance of a deviation from the normal rule of using a pronoun to refer to a preceding noun. For the syntactic reasons outlined above, he had argued that the verse could not have been constructed otherwise, and that it was therefore a category error to think of it as a case of a noun taking the proper place of the pronoun.Footnote ³⁶ Al-Subkī’s answer in his letter in verse would nevertheless be later used by al-Suyūṭī as evidence for the creation of this very subcategory under that rubric. Because of the importance of the Itqān as the reference book par excellence of everything related to the study of the Quran, this new category – and its attribution to al-Subkī, as well as the non-attribution of an opinion to the other two scholars – was repeated by those who were heavily reliant on that work in similar books in the field, such as Ibn ʿAqīlah al-Makkī (d. 1150/1737) in his al-Ziyādah.Footnote ³⁷

Al-Suyūṭī had been aware that other scholars had been involved and that they had provided answers to al-Ṣafaḍī; it was simply the case that in his Muʿtarak and his Itqān he did not mention them. This can be contrasted with two of his other works. In his al-Ashbāh wa-l-naẓāʾir, a book on grammatical issues and errata, he foregrounded the exchange between al-Subkī and al-Ṣafaḍī, and subsumed the letter sent to Zayn al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī and his response, poetry and prose, under that section; al-Qaḥfāzī went unmentioned.Footnote ³⁸ Yet in his metacommentary (ḥāshiya) called Nawāhid al-abkār, on the popular Quran commentary Anwār al-tanzil by the judge Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Bayḍāwī (d. 691/1292), he listed the exchanges with all three scholars. He again foregrounded al-Subkī as al-Ṣafaḍī’s primary interlocutor and used his response to support a similar grammatical response to that Ibn al-Ḥājib (d. 646/1249) had once given to the same problem, albeit unrelated to al-Ṣafaḍī. Al-Suyūṭī then followed this up with the answers of al-Mawṣilī and then al-Qaḥfāzī, in prose and verse, but did not provide any value judgement on their responses.Footnote ³⁹ It appears that he may have found al-Subkī’s response more compelling. It is, however, noteworthy that the genre of his metacommentary in tafsīr and its close connection to the field of balāgha might lead one to assume that he would have afforded more weight to the answers of the others, as will be seen in some of the perspectives below from scholars who share similar disciplinary affiliations. While it is certainly possible that al-Suyūṭī was convinced intellectually, it is also possible that the importance of al-Subkī contributed to his preferring this philological approach over others to which he also demonstrated commitment.

Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī, al-Ālūsī, and Ibn ʿĀshūr: an unconvincing answer to a well-known problem

The general trend of foregrounding al-Subkī and (in this case) the elision of the other scholars who had participated in exchanges on this topic with al-Ṣafaḍī is even more apparent in another later Ottoman-era ḥāshiya on al-Bayḍāwī’s tafsīr. Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī (d. 1069/1659),Footnote ⁴⁰ historically one of the most important commentators on al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār, cited the letter from a certain litterateur (baʿḍ al-udabāʾ) to al-Subkī when he arrived at al-Bayḍāwī’s commentary on this verse. Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī had a habit of eliding names or referring to them obliquely in his main text, and then clarifying in the margins of his copy those he had cited or otherwise engaged with in the main text. In this case, he wrote the name “Ṣafaḍī” (without the definite article) in the margin next to the line where he had written “a certain litterateur”,Footnote ⁴¹ which is present in his autograph copy.Footnote ⁴²

Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī cited in his main text the three lines of poetry from al-Ṣafaḍī that contained the main question, noting that it had been posed to al-Subkī. He did not mention other scholars involved in what he called the “well-known problem” (suʾāl mashhūr).Footnote ⁴³ For his part, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī did not consider the question of whether the phrase “the two of them asked its folk for food” in the Quranic verse was a qualification of the preceding indefinite word “town”, or an apodosis to the earlier conditional “when” – crucial to how al-Subkī had approached his grammar-based response – to be a fruitful avenue of research. He wrote that this discussion was an extended yet useless debate (kalām ṭawīl min ghayri ṭāʾil), and that he had chosen instead to bracket it from his analysis because it was unworthy of discussion (taraknāhu li-qillati jadwāhu).Footnote ⁴⁴ In this way, the so-called “well-known problem” became attached only to the name of the most prominent scholar involved, even when that scholar’s answer had been deemed unworthy of engagement. This citation practice affected later works in the field. Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī (d. 1332/1914), who is sometimes depicted largely through the lens of modern reform, was nevertheless still very much connected to and in conversation with the later tradition of metacommentary writing, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī’s ḥāshiya being in many ways the exemplar of that tradition. In his tafsīr, al-Qāsimī cited from Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī’s ḥāshiya only the letter sent by al-Ṣafadī to al-Subkī.Footnote ⁴⁵ The names that this issue became primarily attached to were thus those two, and the elision of the other two names was also replicated.

Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ālūsī (d. 1270/1854), in his tafsīr Rūḥ al-maʿānī, also called this issue a well-known problem, likely because Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī had done so. He provided al-Ṣafaḍī’s letter and al-Subkī’s response in verse, as well as a summary of the latter’s long response in prose. He also provided the response of Zayn al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī in verse, and a perfunctory summary of his opinion.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is unclear to me what al-Ālūsī’s sources were, but it seems unlikely that it was al-Ṣafaḍī’s Alḥān. It is possible that his sources included a combination of the works of the Subkī brothers – Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Subkī’s ʿArūs is cited in his tafsīr Footnote ⁴⁷ – given the greater similarity between these works and his tafsīr in the transmission of the cited verses, but it is more probable that he relied on al-Suyūṭī’s Ashbāh, given that his citation of the prose sections – without the addition included by the Subkī brothers – mirrors that work.

The tafsīr of al-Ālūsī would serve as the source of this exchange for the later scholar Ibn ʿĀshūr (d. 1393/1973), who wrote one of the most popular Quran commentaries of recent times, his al-Taḥrīr wa-l-tanwīr. Ibn ʿĀshūr is an example of how al-Subkī was prioritized amongst those al-Ṣafaḍī had sent letters to. In his Taḥrīr, he reported that al-Ṣafaḍī had asked al-Subkī a question in verse about the nuance behind repeating the noun instead of using the expected pronoun in al-Kahf. Ibn ʿĀshūr remarked that while al-Subkī had given a long response in prose and verse, he had found it to be ultimately unconvincing (wa-ajābahu al-Subkī jawāban ṭawīlan nathran wa-naẓman bi-mā lā yuqniʿ). He did not recount the exchange, referring readers instead to al-Ālūsī.Footnote ⁴⁸ Preceding his reference to this exchange, Ibn ʿĀshūr had given his own short answer to this problem, an answer which reflected the approach of Zayn al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī and Najm al-Dīn al-Qaḥfāzī. Nevertheless, his only reference to the responding scholars on this topic was al-Subkī. Even though his source al-Ālūsī had also cited the response of al-Mawṣilī, and even though Ibn ʿĀshūr did not agree with al-Subkī but rather with al-Mawṣilī and al-Qaḥfāzī, his reference to this exchange in his tafsīr was still only to al-Subkī and not to either of these other scholars.

The affinity that scholars in the metacommentary tradition, like Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī, might have for the answers or approaches to a resolution employed by Zayn al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī and Najm al-Dīn al-Qaḥfāzī is to be expected from a disciplinary perspective, in that the metacommentary tradition on the Quran shared a disciplinary trajectory and assumptions about language use with the field of balāgha, and many of the scholars writing in that tradition also wrote commentaries or metacommentaries based on handbooks in balāgha. The same can be applied to scholars like al-Ālūsī and Ibn ʿĀshūr, whose works were heavily reliant on the metacommentary tradition, namely those written on the Kashshāf of al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144) and the Anwār. This did not, however, prevent the affair in question from being associated with a scholar and a type of answer for which they did not share a disciplinary affinity.

Muḥammad b. Yūsuf Aṭfayyish and an update to the exchange

An unexpected example of how this exchange was transmitted and the inadvertent priority afforded to al-Subkī, with reference to al-Ālūsī and the al-Ṣafaḍī critic Badr al-Dīn al-Damāmīnī (d. 827/1424), comes in the works of Muḥammad b. Yūsuf AṭfayyishFootnote ⁴⁹ (d. 1332/1914), the famous late-nineteenth to early twentieth-century Ibāḍī Algerian scholar known as Quṭb al-Aʾimmah (Pole of the Imams).Footnote ⁵⁰ Aṭfayyish wrote three tafsīr works, the Himyān al-zād ilā dār al-maʿād, the Dāʿī al-ʿamal li-yawm al-amal, and the Taysīr al-tafsīr.Footnote ⁵¹ Only the first and the last of these are fully extant and well known. Aṭfayyish wrote the Himyān when he was about thirty years old, and the Taysīr when he was over eighty years old; he felt that his two earlier tafsīr works were being neglected by lazy readers who found them too long and boring.

Aṭfayyish first recorded the exchange between al-Ṣafaḍī and al-Subkī in his Himyān,Footnote ⁵² including the letter from al-Ṣafaḍī and a very short paraphrase of part of al-Subkī’s answer in prose. By the time he wrote his last tafsīr, however, he had come across new information. He wrote in his Taysīr that fifty years prior, in his youth, he had seen some verses by al-Ṣafaḍī asking al-Subkī about this Quranic problem; those were the verses he had recorded in his Himyān. He continued to report that he had read them in Badr al-Dīn al-Damāmīnī’s commentary on Ibn Hishām’s Mughnī al-labīb, a book on grammar.Footnote ⁵³ Al-Damāmīnī had penned the commentary in India, fleeing his creditors in Cairo. Aṭfayyish had a special interest in Ibn Hishām’s book on grammar. When he was a young man, he had summarized the contents of the work in verse. It may be that he read al-Damāmīnī’s work around the same time, possibly even using it to help write his versification of the Mughnī. However, I have not been able to find the verses in question in the modern print edition of al-Damāmīnī’s commentary; moreover, the location where al-Damāmīnī explains the repetition of the noun “folk” does not mention the exchange.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is possible that Aṭfayyish had seen it in a manuscript copy of the same work, or its expanded version,Footnote ⁵⁵ or another work of al-Damāmīnī’s, who was very familiar with al-Ṣafaḍī’s works,Footnote ⁵⁶ or that he was misremembering where he had read the information. On the assumption that Aṭfayyish had indeed seen the citation in one of al-Damāmīnī’s works, the source of the latter may have been Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Subkī’s commentary, since al-Damāmīnī cites Bahāʾ al-Dīn’s commentary throughout his own commentary. However, based on the minor variations in the verses cited in the Himyān from those present in the ʿArūs al-afrāḥ and the Alḥān, his direct source may have been a different transmission of the exchange.

In the Taysīr, Aṭfayyish now went on to cite and engage with a longer summary of al-Subkī’s position in prose. He also wrote that “after the passage of about fifty years”, he had found an answer by two people, and included the verses by al-Subkī and then al-Mawṣilī, without naming them.Footnote ⁵⁷ Importantly, Aṭfayyish’s updated summary of al-Subkī’s position, and the citations of verses from the two scholars, are very clearly derived from al-Ālūsī’s tafsīr, based on the similarity to distinctive phrases al-Ālūsī used in his summaryFootnote ⁵⁸ as well as where he started and ended his poetry verse selections from the two scholars.

The example of Aṭfayyish is illustrative of the trend in the transmission of this exchange. Aṭfayyish first read about the exchange, assumedly through a commentary by al-Damāmīnī, who had been familiar with the works of al-Ṣafaḍī and the Subkī family. The initial discussion in his Himyān was only about al-Subkī, meaning that whatever work he had relied upon had prioritized that exchange to the exclusion of the others. Later in his life, in the early 1900s, he had come across al-Ālūsī’s tafsīr, and made use of the extra material it contained about this topic for his Taysīr. Al-Ālūsī had cited al-Mawṣilī by name, had transmitted most of the verses of al-Mawṣilī’s response, and had included only a very short summary of his opinion. However, even when Aṭfayyish made use of this material in the Taysīr, while the verses of al-Mawṣilī were cited, it was done anonymously (“someone said in verse”).Footnote ⁵⁹ This followed a broad pattern of the priority given to al-Subkī over al-Mawṣilī and the near exclusion of al-Qaḥfāzī in the transmission of the exchanges dealing with the Quranic verse in question.

Handwritten copies

This priority has also been reflected in how the exchange was copied out at times by itself. There are two known examples of this. The exchange has been recorded in a miscellany (majmūʿ) currently held in Cyprus. Cyprus A 1138/4 fols. 89b-90b contains first the two main verses that outline al-Ṣafaḍī’s question to al-Subkī (the last two lines of al-Ṣafaḍī’s question in verse above), and then only the prose answer of al-Subkī.Footnote ⁶⁰ The exchange was catalogued as Jawāb Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafaḍī ilā al-shaykh Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī ʿan qawlihi taʿālā istaṭʿamā ahlahā (The Answer of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafaḍī to Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī about the Most High saying, “The two of them asked its folk for food”). This is obviously miscatalogued, since it was the other way around. Following al-Subkī’s answer, Zayn al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī’s answer in verse and prose was appended; it was also misidentified by the cataloguers as al-Ṣalāḥ’s answer to Zayn al-Dīn.Footnote ⁶¹

The exchange had also been recorded in another miscellany,Footnote ⁶² previously held at the Aḥmadiyya collection in Mosul; unfortunately, it may no longer be extant, possibly among the manuscripts looted by the Islamic State/Daesh. It had been catalogued as Rasāʾil mutabādala bayna al-Ṣafaḍī wa-l-Subkī fī maʿnā qawlihī taʿālā istaṭʿamā ahlahā (Letters exchanged between al-Ṣafaḍī and al-Subkī on the meaning of the Most High saying, “The two of them asked its folk for food”).Footnote ⁶³ The miscellany it had been in contained a number of other works from around the Mamlūk period, including a short treatise by Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī called al-Rifdah fī maʿnā al-waḥda (alternatively: waḥdah),Footnote ⁶⁴ a work on the meaning of the word “alone”, prompted by al-Zamakhsharī’s usageFootnote ⁶⁵ of the term in explaining a verse of the Quran, Ghāfir 40:80.Footnote ⁶⁶ This copy is another attestation of the close relationship between the two, one factor in the canonization of their exchange. Al-Ṣafaḍī had copied out al-Subkī’s autograph of this treatise in his own hand, and had then read his copy back to al-Subkī. He was thus granted an ijāza by al-Subkī to transmit it. This ijāza is present in manuscript copies of the work.Footnote ⁶⁷ Pleased with the whole experience, al-Ṣafaḍī wrote the following couplet in praise of the work, which is now present on the covers of some of its extant manuscript copies:Footnote ⁶⁸

This was not the only short piece of writing from al-Subkī that al-Ṣafaḍī treated in this manner. Aside from the relatively longer works he read back to him, he also recounted in his biographical dictionaries various other works that he copied out and read back to the author, and for which he wrote similar blurbs (taqārīẓ).Footnote ⁶⁹

Al-Ṣafaḍī also recorded that he personally copied out al-Subkī’s answer to his letter about the al-Kahf question – prose and poetry – and read it back to him.Footnote ⁷⁰ That he did so indicates the importance al-Ṣafaḍī attached to this answer specifically, even if it was not ultimately the answer he found most compelling in terms of its substantive content. This is a further piece of evidence for the priority afforded this answer historically, as no such importance was given to the other two answers. Indeed, it is curious that the answer al-Ṣafaḍī thought was superior – the only one he had praised for its content, al-Qaḥfāzī’s answerFootnote ⁷¹ – was the one to receive the least attention historically.

Al-Ṣafaḍī’s closer relationship with and geographic proximity to al-Subkī of course likely facilitated his copying and reading out only that answer. Another factor may have been the fact that al-Subkī was in the upper echelons of the scholarly hierarchy and therefore the type of individual al-Ṣafaḍī wanted to attach himself to in a formal way, crystallized in a relationship that was part pedagogical, in the reading out to al-Subkī and receiving ijāzas. It was also partly one of academic patronage, in the writing out of blurbsFootnote ⁷² promoting al-Subkī’s works, while also positioning oneself as an authority qualified to weigh in on the subject matter.Footnote ⁷³ Formally attaching himself in these varied ways as a strategy – all of which have very clear parallels in modern day practices in the academic world – obviously succeeded for al-Ṣafaḍī. He has been cited throughout history, solely due to his connection to al-Subkī, in works of grammar and tafsīr in which he would not otherwise have been mentioned; as an example, he is only mentioned once in each of al-Suyūṭī’s Itqān Footnote ⁷⁴ and his Muʿtarak,Footnote ⁷⁵ both in connection to this exchange. This is, incidentally, different from the case of the Subkī family; because they were active in many of the classical domains of Islamic scholarship, and produced well-known works in those fields, they have continued to be cited frequently and directly, and not simply because they wrote the promotional blurb for someone else’s work or sent someone else a letter.

Modern works

In more recent works the process of the priority historically given to al-Subkī continues. In Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Khāliq Uḍayma’s (d. 1404/1984) magisterial Dirāsāt li-uslūb al-Qurʾān al-karīm, only al-Ṣafaḍī’s letter to al-Subkī, and the latter’s answer, is referenced on this question. This is so even though the author did not hold al-Subkī’s opinion, but rather that of another Mamlūk scholar who also had weighed in on the subject in his own tafsīr, Abū Ḥayyān (d. 745/1344).Footnote ⁷⁶ ʿAbd al-Jalīl Shalabī, in a 1975 article on some linguistic problems in the Quran, also mentioned only the exchange between al-Ṣafaḍī and al-Subkī, and that it had been recorded by the son Bahāʾ al-Dīn and then by al-Ālūsī. Even though Shalabī was aware of al-Ālūsī, and discussed in some detail the overall linguistic problem, he did not mention al-Mawṣilī, who had been cited by al-Ālūsī, nor al-Qaḥfāzī.Footnote ⁷⁷ A recent example of the prioritization of al-Subkī is in ʿAbd al-Razzāq Ḥusayn Aḥmad’s 2015–16 book on the very topic of repeating or using a noun instead of an expected pronoun, and which bears the descriptive title, al-Iẓhār fī maqām al-iḍmār fī -l-Qurʾān al-karīm. Here too, Aḥmad only mentions al-Subkī in connection to the letter al-Ṣafaḍī had sent, informing the reader that there was a nice story behind the example of the Kahf verse (wa-lihādha al-mithāl qiṣṣa ṭarīfa). Aḥmad had followed al-Suyūṭī in creating a new category of reasons for why a noun might be repeated based on al-Subkī’s answer, the only example that has ever been given for this new category due to the Subkī influence.Footnote ⁷⁸

In summary, the exchange between al-Ṣafaḍī and al-Subkī would come to be promoted in various sources, beginning with al-Ṣafaḍī’s own works and his own scholarly practices and the works of the Subkī sons. It would then be mentioned in works of grammar, such as those of the Ṣafaḍī critic Badr al-Dīn al-Damāmīnī (possibly his commentary on Ibn Hishām’s Mughnī al-labīb) and al-Suyūṭī’s al-Ashbāh wa-l-naẓāʾir. It would also be mentioned in other influential works like al-Suyūṭī’s Itqān. These would be the sources for later works in Quran commentary in which the priority given to al-Subkī’s involvement in this matter continued, including the works of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī and al-Ālūsī. These would in turn serve as sources for more recent works like the commentaries of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī, Ibn ʿĀshūr, and Muḥammad b. Yūsuf Aṭfayyish, which perpetuated the priority afforded the most famous participant in these exchanges.

However, it was not simply that one answer was mentioned more than others. It was also the case that because of al-Subkī’s prominence, an answer that may not otherwise have been seen as compelling came to be seen as such in many – but certainly not all – quarters. Indeed, in the field of ʿulūm al-Qurʾān, the prominence attached to his answer served to form a new category of justification for using nouns instead of pronouns, something with which al-Subkī did not agree. Moreover, even when works in Quran commentary and related fields did not find al-Subkī’s answer convincing, the process of the promotion of this specific answer made it one of the most notable exchanges related to Quran commentary history, such that it was often recalled in various types of works in relation to “the well-known problem”.

Letter to Jamāl al-Dīn al-Subkī

Al-Ṣafaḍī wrote to al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Kāfī – that is, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 755/1354), son of Taqī al-Dīn and brother of Bahāʾ al-Dīn and Tāj al-Dīn – asking about another oddity of Quranic philology. His question was about a certain obvious problem at the beginning of Hal atā (a common name for Sūra 76, al-Insān). Al-Ṣafaḍī recorded this letter as well as the then deputy-judge’s response in his Alḥān.Footnote ⁷⁹ He wrote to him (meter: kāmil):

Al-Ṣafaḍī noted that Jamāl al-Dīn al-Subkī wrote back to him quickly. Pointing out the immediacy of his response should be read as praise of Jamāl al-Dīn’s ability to formulate quickly a matching response in verse. He responded (meter: kāmil):

This exchange was not an obvious riddle (lughz), and al-Ṣafaḍī did not label it so, as he does with much of his other correspondence, including a letter-riddle that Jamāl al-Dīn al-Subkī himself had sent him (kataba huwa raḥimahu Allāhu taʿālā ilayya mulghizan).Footnote ⁸² However, this letter nevertheless appears to have been a type of playful intellectual challenge. As with many of his letters, al-Ṣafaḍī clearly had an idea as to how to resolve the problem that he was enamoured with, as is suggested in the first hemistich of line five of his letter, and was testing Jamāl al-Dīn to come up with an answer similar to his own resolution. Jamāl al-Dīn, aside from the requisite humility shown in line seven of his response, also hinted that his answer may not be exactly what al-Ṣafaḍī had in mind.

The framing of the question and its response centred around a problem related to ʿilm al-badīʿ, the study of rhetorical devices, by this time a branch of the study of balāgha. ʿIlm al-badīʿ is referred to by al-Ṣafaḍī in line nine of his question, and the discipline of balāgha by Jamāl al-Dīn in line two of his response. This ʿilm al-badīʿ had been introduced and codified as the third branch of balāgha by the Damascene scholar Badr al-Dīn Ibn Mālik (d. 686/1287), although the term badīʿ had been used previously to refer to a wide range of such devices. The interest in formal elements of stylistics, especially among the administrative class,Footnote ⁸³ was also mirrored in the fascination with badīʿ and badīʿiyya poetry (praise poems of the Prophet Muhammad attempting to display the virtuosity of the poet in making use of the entire range of rhetorical devices)Footnote ⁸⁴ at that time.

The problem discussed here was that even though there was parallelism (ṭibāq)Footnote ⁸⁵ between gratitude and ingratitude in the Quranic verse, formal metrical congruence (muwāzana)Footnote ⁸⁶ of the parallel elements was still a desideratum and a marker of refined literary style; an obvious breach of that congruence, as in the verse in question, demanded an explanation because it would otherwise be a glaring example of poor style.Footnote ⁸⁷ The answer given by Jamāl al-Dīn justified the lack of congruence by appealing to a communicative reason: the deviation from an expected stylistic norm was meant to communicate the difference between gratitude and ingratitude in the face of God’s blessings. When it comes to ingratitude (kufr), a little is too much, whereas with gratitude (shukr), even a lot of it is never enough. This type of answer is reminiscent of how al-Qaḥfāzī and al-Mawṣilī justified the deviation from the norm of pronoun usage – a problem in ʿilm al-maʿānī, another branch of balāgha that analyses the pragmatic effect of changing syntactic structure – by similarly arguing that there was a communicative reason for having done so.

This style of argumentation was a defining feature of ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s approach to language, which changed the kinds of questions asked and answers given on matters of literary style, especially as it related to the Quran. While ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s account of the communicative force behind language structure was the most developed, it is certainly the case that specific examples of analysis of this type could be found elsewhere. In the case of this verse, the ʿAbbāsid judge and scholar Abū al-Ḥasan al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058) seems to have been the first to articulate the type of response Jamāl al-Dīn would later provide. Al-Māwardī wrote in his tafsīr work, al-Nukat wa-l-ʿuyūn:

This idea was then reiterated approximately two centuries later in tafsīr works heavily reliant on the Nukat by two Egypt-based scholars, al-ʿIzz b. ʿAbd al-Salām (d. 660/1261), who mentioned a version of this in his tafsīr Footnote ⁸⁹ derived from al-Māwardī,Footnote ⁹⁰ and al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1273), who quoted in his tafsīr work al-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-Qurʾān al-Māwardī’s position above.Footnote ⁹¹ Around the same time in Tabriz, al-Bayḍāwī provided a similarly communicative reason for the lack of congruence in this verse, although he does not appear to have derived the idea from al-Māwardī.Footnote ⁹² By the time of al-Ṣafaḍī, this had become a well-known issue in tafsīr works. That the issue had been discussed in popular works in the field lends weight to both the curmudgeonly complaint of al-Damāmīnī that al-Ṣafaḍī had the habit of making mountains out of molehills and being self-satisfied at having done so, as well as the reasonable rejoinder that al-Ṣafaḍī may have been using well-known issues not only for their content, but also for the occasion of intellectual play.Footnote ⁹³

Some of the conditions were ripe for Jamāl al-Dīn al-Subkī’s exchange with al-Ṣafaḍī to become attached to this verse’s interpretation, whether in regular tafsīr works, or the metacommentary (ḥāshiya) tradition on al-Bayḍāwī and subsequently the works based on those metacommentaries. It was an instance of a well-known Quranic problem that was philological in nature being resolved in a literary medium, it involved a historical event and known actors, and it utilized key terms in an emerging discipline to resolve the problem in a way that had broad appeal in the scholarly tradition. However, the correspondence does not appear to have been quoted in later works of tafsīr, balāgha, or grammar. It was mentioned by al-Ṣafaḍī in his Aʿyān, and only partially by Jamāl al-Dīn’s brother Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī in his Ṭabaqāt (lines 6–11 of the question, and lines 4–6 of the response).Footnote ⁹⁴ However, its overall lack of mention by important figures in these fields of knowledge, as well as the relative obscurity of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Subkī in comparison to his father Taqī al-Dīn, did not lend itself to the correspondence being promoted or attached to the interpretation of this verse like Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī’s exchange with al-Ṣafaḍī was over the al-Kahf verse.

Al-Ṣafaḍī sent a letter in Ramadan 744/1344 from Damascus about a similar philological problem to another Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī.Footnote ⁹⁵ This was Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, a deputy judge in Damascus, a professor at the Rukniyyah madrasa, and the second nephew of the Taqī al-Dīn with whom al-Ṣafaḍī had corresponded about the al-Kahf verse.Footnote ⁹⁶ This letter was similar to the one sent to Jamāl al-Dīn al-Subkī in that it contained trivia questions relating to the use of intensive forms of nouns which do not prima facie fit their context. The letter problematized two such usages: the intensive verb form of “unjust” (ẓallām) when used to describe God in a Prophetic hadith: “God is not unjust to the creation” (wa-mā Allāhu bi-ẓallāmin li-l-bariyyah). This phrase has parallel usage in the Quran, for example in Fuṣṣilat 41:46, “And your Lord is not unjust (ẓallām) to the servants”. Al-Ṣafadī also asked Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf about the use of the intensive form of “pure” (ṭahūr) to describe water. Shāfiʿīs like al-Ṣafadī and al-Subki held that even a single use of such water in ritual ablutions, characterized with that intensive form, would cause it to lose that characteristic. This is counterintuitive for water characterized with an intensive form of purity; the use of that form appeared to support the opinion of a competing school of law, the Mālikīs, who held that water characterized as such does not lose that characteristic merely through its use. Despite the similarity in questions to the one sent to Jamāl al-Dīn, in that they were both about unexpected uses of intensive forms of a noun, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf appeared to favour the opinion that the intensive forms used were inconsequential and effectively used in place of their non-intensive forms; while he allowed in his responses that there might be a communicative reason for choosing these forms, he did not clearly and convincingly articulate what these might be.

Letter from al-Ḥusayn b. Sulaymān b. Abū al-Ḥasan b. Sulaymān b. Rayyān

A final example of an exchange related to the Quran, and one which did not enjoy much subsequent attention, was a letter from al-Ḥusayn b. Rayyān (d. c. 769–770/1367–69), a scholar who was part of the administrative elite around the Levant.Footnote ⁹⁷ Aside from describing him as eloquent, al-Ṣafadī mentioned in his Alḥān his having been a judge, holding the high office of clerk of the royal bench (muwaqqiʿ al-dast) in Ḥalab, and a controller of the financial bureaus (nāẓir of the dawāwīn) in Hama.Footnote ⁹⁸

Al-Ḥusayn b. Rayyān had a long history of correspondence with al-Ṣafadī, as is evidenced in the Alḥān, with both sides initiating at various points in time. Most of these letters were in verse, but occasionally in prose; they tended to be quite long, and they received responses in kind. This extended correspondence between the two occupies over 20 pages in the printed edition of the Alḥān.Footnote ⁹⁹ It began in at least 724/1323–24 when al-Ṣafadī, who missed him, wrote a letter from Ṣafad while Ibn Rayyān was in Ḥalab. Some of these letters contained trivia or riddles. One, sent by Ibn Rayyān, was an extended riddle about a minaret.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The letter that concerned the Quran was sent by Ibn Rayyān while al-Ṣafadī was in Ḥalab, and is far shorter than most of their letters. It was a trivia question on an obscure grammatical occurrence in the Quran. He wrote (meter: rajaz):Footnote ¹⁰¹

Al-Ṣafadī wrote back to him (meter: rajaz):

Al-Ṣafadī was not content with the verses alone as a response. He wrote under these verses an explanation, clarifying that he meant in his poetry first the Quranic verse al-Ṣāffāt 37:86, “Is it a false god other than God you want?” As an alternative, he offered in the final line the example of al-Anbiyāʾ 21:22, “Were there gods therein except God, both would have been ruined”, in which the meaning of “except” in this verse means “other than”. It is possible that al-Ṣafadī wrote this as an explanation for readers of his Alḥān, not to Ibn Rayyān, who assumedly was perspicacious enough to understand what he had meant. Even though these are instances of curious grammatical usage in the Quran, this pithy exchange between the two did not become associated with the commentary of either verse in any field of philology or Quran commentary.