Muḥammad Husayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī (1904-1981)

Given the intellectual and spiritual authority he commanded both during his lifetime and in posthumous reception of his work, Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī can safely be considered as one of the most influential Islamic scholars in more recent history, certainly as far as the Shiite community is concerned. This chapter, out of a scholarly output ranging from jurisprudence to mystical poetry, confines itself to Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s Qurʾānic exegesis and the hermeneutical concept underlying it. In the case of this particular scholar, however, even this limited topic could not be meaningfully discussed unless we connect it, at the more immediate level, to Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s overall scholarly concerns and intellectual-spiritual background, then, in a wider context, to transformations inside the Shiite religious institution in the second half of the 20th century, and, finally, to Iran’s more recent sociocultural history as a whole. Placing Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s exegetical approach to God’s word in this threefold perspective is also indispensable for understanding the deep and lasting significance of his whole work as a scholar, including his exegesis of the Qurʾān.