The typology of conceptual quotations in the Al-Tibyan Fi Tafsir al-Qur’an

One of the characteristics of the interpretation Al-Tibyan Fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, authored by Sheikh Tousi, is the inclusion of interpretive statements and quotations from both Shia and Sunni scholars. This inclusion has not been done in just one way; for the statements quoted from Imams (peace be upon them), the author has just conveyed the gist or the main idea of every statement by omitting certain words from it. What is quoted in his book, therefore, suffers from being manipulated and unduly shortened or curtailed. What makes the problem even worse is that Sheikh Tousi’s interpretation has served as a reference or a source from which Tabarsi’s Majma’ ul-Bayan Interpretation and the subsequent interpretive works, especially those based on Hadiths, have derived a lot. The present study firstly refers to the clarification of conceptual quotations generally put forth in the literature and then introduces the types of such quotations actually used in the Al-Tibyan Interpretation. It is shown that the original forms of some Hadiths have not been reported in the book; rather, it is just the core concepts that are quoted by the author. Those Hadiths are beset with a variety of distortions including lexical substitution, addition, substitution and displacement of words and structures as well as alteration in the sequence or combination of words and sentences. This has made it hard to understand the true meanings of Hadiths in the absence of their original forms. As a matter of fact, quoting a concept with no care for its linguistic and contextual features leads to distrust in both the quoted subject and the quoting author.