Preliminary Remarks on the Historiography of <i>tafsīr</i> in Arabic: A History of the Book Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since all the extensive histories of the tafsīr genre published so far are in Arabic, a close analysis of the historiography of these works is a desideratum. In this article I will argue that there are three major categories of historiography, the traditional Ashʿarī, the Salafī, and the modernist. Identifying these camps is essential if we desire to understand the manner in which tafsīr studies has been approached so far, since the proponents of all three have produced, and continue to produce, the editions of tafsīr works that are the basis of most histories in Western academia. It will also allow us to investigate the history of the all-present term ‘al-tafsīr bi'l-maʾthūr’ which has come to play a key role in the categorisation of tafāsīr. Charting the historiography of tafsīr, moreover, is here undertaken in conjunction with discussion of the history of publications of editions of tafsīr in the Arab world. In other words, a history of the editions themselves as eventful milestones in a historiography of tafsīr is the primary means through which I attempt to understand this selfsame historiography.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".