And a believing man of Pharaoh's family, who hid his faith, said: Would ye kill a man because he saith: My Lord is Allah, and hath brought you clear proofs from your Lord? If he is lying, then his lie is upon him; and if he is truthful, then some of that wherewith he threateneth you will strike you. Lo! Allah guideth not one who is a prodigal, a liar — 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 Ghāfir begins at vol. 8, p. 159(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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loci in the corpus
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act
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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 44, ¶33 · numbered by Ḥafṣ · lesson opens at vol. 8, p. 159 · the annual Ramaḍān cycle
لما توعده فرعون (إِنِّے عُذْتُ بِرَبِّے وَرَبِّكُم مِّن كُلِّ مُتَكَبِّرࣲ لَّا يُومِنُ بِيَوْمِ اِ۬لْحِسَابِۖ) استعاذ بالله تبارك وتعالى، لم يشتغل بالعدو، بل استجار بالله تبارك وتعالى فقيض اللّٰه له في الحين عبدا يرد عنه ويكافح عنه أعداءه (وَقَالَ رَجُلࣱ مُّومِنࣱ مِّنَ اٰلِ فِرْعَوْنَ) قيل هو ابن عمه[1]
في رياض التفسير للقرآن الكريمtafsīrunbracketed quotation
1383 / 1964 · Arabic · Lesson 44, ¶38 · numbered by Ḥafṣ · lesson opens at vol. 8, p. 159 · the annual Ramaḍān cycle
(يَكْتُمُ إِيمَٰنَهُۥٓ أَتَقْتُلُونَ رَجُلاً اَنْ يَّقُولَ رَبِّيَ اَ۬للَّهُ)) قام مؤمن آل فرعون وهو الذي أننه أم موسى تطلب منه أن يصنع لها صندوقا فوقع له ما وقع، آمن قبل كل أحد، الصديقون ثلاثة كما يقول الرسول صلى اللّٰه عليه وسلم: حبيب النجار، مومن آل ياسين - تقدم أول أمس - ومؤمن آل فرعون وثالثهم أبو بكر الصديق وهو أفضلهم. سألوا ابن عمرو بن العاص: ما أشد ما لقي النبي صلى اللّٰه عليه وسلم من قومه؟ فبكى وقال أشد شيء جاءه عقبة بن أبي معيط وهو صلى اللّٰه عليه وسلم ساجد يصلي فأخذ بتلابيب النبي صلى اللّٰه عليه وسلم يخنقه خنقا شديدا يكذبه ويقول إنه جاء بعبادة غير آلهتهم فيقول النبي صلى اللّٰه عليه وسلم: أنا الذي فعل ذلك أنا الذي قال ذلك، حتى أتى أبو بكر فدفع عقبة بن أبي معيط وقال: أتقتلون رجلا أن يقول ربي اللّه. فانصرف النبي صلى اللّٰه عليه وسلم وجلس في مقابلتهم وكل صناديد قريش جلوس حاضرون وقال: (اللهم عليك بقريش، اللهم عليك بقريش، اللهم عليك بقريش، عليك بعقبة بن أبي معيط، عليك بأبي جهل بن …
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.
Muḥammad al-Mishrīالقنابل اليدوية في الذب عن طريق الصوفيةproof-text
rev. July 2018 · Arabic · Question 15 · tr. Saʿīd Simone Nardella & Adnan Wood-Smith · answered in writing
Feten and reviewing with him my understanding of Allah’s speech, when he said to me that my father (r.a.a.) had said to him that he was able to extract all the meanings of the Qur’an from His (t.) words, “Two men said” (Qur’an 5:23). Then I said to him that I was able to do that with His (t.) words, “And one man said” (Qur’an 40:28).
Muḥammad al-Mishrī, not Shaykh Ibrāhīm — the school reading, in a responsum. Question 15.
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.