1 Introduction

If you want to understand the interpretation of the Qurʾān without frowning in confusion when you read it, this book is your best choice!¹

This blurb, taken from the back cover of a 2016 Indonesian translation of the Qurʾānic commentary of Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373), might seem somewhat surprising, given that it advertises a six-volume box set of books by a fourteenth-century Damascene scholar who specialized in ḥadīth and history, and not so much in providing guidance for the easily-confused average Muslim. However, the branding of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr as a beginner’s guide to Qurʾānic exegesis is ubiquitous today and undergirded by an astonishing amount of publishing activity. The Mamluk scholar’s work of exegesis has been printed in countless Arabic editions, many of them abridged, and translated into numerous languages, including Azeri, Bengali, Dutch, English, French, German,² Indonesian, Kurdish, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Urdu. It is available in app stores in multiple versions and languages, and many Islamic bookstores offer it for sale as one of the most authoritative works of tafsīr, if not the most authoritative.³ What is even more striking is the fact that Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr has been translated into many of these languages not once but multiple times. In the Indonesian language, there are no less than eight different translations of this work, all of them covering the entire Qurʾān. This indicates a substantial commercial interest on the part of Indonesian Islamic publishers. Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary seems to in high demand in the archipelago.

This chapter will look at the strategies of publishers and translators in editing, translating, and promoting the tafsīr of Ibn Kathīr in Indonesia. I will discuss the presentation and marketing of the printed editions as well as methods of abridgment and translation. I will subsequently ask what they tell us about the intended use and target group of the tafsīr and the makeup of the Indonesian religious field.

2 A Mamluk Scholar’s tafsīr and Its Rise to Fame in the Twentieth Century

While Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary is a magisterial work, at the time of its completion there was nothing to indicate that it might once become the most famous and popular Qurʾānic commentary in Sunni Islam. It was firmly grounded in the tafsīr tradition but Ibn Kathīr’s exegetical method also reflected his dissatisfaction with some of the dominant trends in Mamluk Islamic learning.⁴ Born in Buṣrā around 701/1301, Ibn Kathīr moved to Damascus as a young man where he studied the fiqh of his own Shāfiʿī school. At the time, there was a segment of the Shāfiʿī scholarly community with strong traditionalist leanings. They favoured the study of ḥadīth over kalām and were at odds with the politically more powerful Shāfiʿī Ashʿarīs. Ibn Kathīr became part of this trend.

He was the author of a large number of works in various disciplines including fiqh, ḥadīth and history. Most of them were targeted at specialists in their fields.⁵ This is also true for his tafsīr.⁶ Like all exegetes, Ibn Kathīr admitted to the existence of different opinions on a given exegetical problem but he also reduced the polyphony of voices by carefully selecting those that he included. Unhappy with many earlier exegetes’ lack of discretion when listing the whole range of exegetical traditions at their disposal, he aimed to focus on authentic ḥadīths and well-attested traditions about the prophet’s companions and their successor generation while indicating his distrust of stories of Jewish or Christian origin (isrāʾīliyyāt) about the biblical material in the Qurʾān.

In order to corroborate this methodology, Ibn Kathīr cited his famous teacher Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (661/1263–728/1328) in the introduction to his tafsīr, emphasizing the need to primarily rely on the text of the Qurʾān and on authentic traditions about the Prophet, his companions and their successors, rather than later authorities.⁷ Ibn Kathīr strove to avoid the type of scholastic theological exegesis that was prominent in the madrasa teaching of his times, represented by the voluminous tafsīr by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1209).⁸ He also steered clear of a substantial part of the narrative material on earlier prophets, especially concerning biblical figures. That said, Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr did not constitute a break with the exegetical tradition. It was embedded in scholarly discourses and disputes of its time and was directed at other scholars, rather than students, let alone a general public.

While Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary was transmitted throughout the centuries and was counted as a respectable work of exegesis in its author’s area of specialization, namely, ḥadīth scholarship, it was far from being among the most popular works of the genre. It was too extensive and scholarly to be taught in madrasas, nor was it the subject of glosses or meta-commentaries. In an environment in which scholasticism, rhetoric, and esoteric approaches to knowledge were at the core of Islamic religious learning and the recourse to the opinions of the earliest generations of Muslims was a niche interest at best, it would have been surprising if Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary had elicited more than passing interest.⁹

This changed dramatically in the twentieth century when reformist trends emerged in the Arab world, particularly in Syria and Egypt, that were critical of the scholasticism and esotericism of Islamic scholarship and demanded a return to the sources of Islam. This was often embedded in larger contests for authority and legitimacy within the rapidly changing political context of the time that was marked by the demise of the Ottoman Empire.¹⁰ For some proponents of this reformist trend, the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, including the radical return to the authority of the Qurʾān and the Sunna that he demanded, played a major role in their struggle against the dominance of traditional religious scholars and Sufi sheikhs.¹¹

While Ibn Taymiyya had not left behind a complete tafsīr, his disciple Ibn Kathīr had. As a result, the publication activities of the reformist trend that at some point came to be labelled as “Salafi” had a deep impact on the field of tafsīr, elevating Ibn Kathīr to an unprecedented position of authority.¹² In 1936, the Ḥanbali mufti of Damascus commissioned the printing of Ibn Taymiyya’s Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr which started to shape the perspective of Sunni scholars and intellectuals on Qurʾānic hermeneutics to a remarkable degree. At this point, it had already ceased to be an obscure, barely known treatise because, as mentioned before, it was part of the introduction to Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr which had been published in 1924 by none other than Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (1860–1935) with a grant from the Āl Suʿūd. This was probably the first edition of a premodern tafsīr that focused on usability for readers outside the madrasa sphere. Unlike earlier prints of Qurʾānic commentaries that had adopted the layout of manuscripts, this edition used paragraph breaks, headers and verse numbering, making Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary accessible to readers who did not know the Qurʾān by heart.¹³

However, there are limits to the appeal of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr to Muslims without a background in Islamic learning. It is a massive work; one recent unabridged Arabic version consists of seven volumes with more than 4,500 pages.¹⁴ Moreover, it has many features typical of premodern Qurʾānic commentaries that makes it hard to digest to readers unfamiliar with the genre. Ibn Kathīr cites countless, often very similar traditions with full chains of transmitters (isnād), of course without providing bibliographic references that would make it easy for readers to identify his sources. He alludes to legal or theological debates that he assumes his readers can easily situate, and he frequently proposes conflicting explanations without evaluating them or resolving the conflict. As would have been expected of any Mamluk scholar writing a tafsīr, he quotes poetry and discusses semantic details. His work is not structured by chapter headings, nor does it have paragraph breaks.

In short, Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary is far from being a simple, accessible textbook that offers guidance (hidāya) for believers. But that was how Muslim intellectuals and activists from the Salafi spectrum and beyond more and more frequently expected the Qurʾān to function in the early twentieth century. The paradigm of reading the Qurʾān for ethical guidance was promoted by Islamic reformers such as Muḥammad ʿAbduh as well as mass movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood.¹⁵ This increased the demand for a reliable Qurʾānic commentary because the Qurʾān, by itself, is ill-suited to be used as an Islamic instruction manual. But Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr, for all the religious prestige and authority it was accorded by its modern proponents, had never been meant to assume that function either.

This was what motivated Aḥmad Shākir (1892–1958), one of the prominent editors of Islamic classics in the first half of the twentieth century, to work on an abridged version of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr. Its publication was not complete at the time of his death; only in 2002 did another editor finalize the work, based on Shākir’s manuscripts.¹⁶ By that time, a host of alternative abridged versions of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr in Arabic had already been published, ranging from moderately shortened editions that merely reduced the length the isnāds of traditions to completely rewritten works that aim to summarize Ibn Kathīr’s thoughts in modern Arabic. New versions continue to hit the market.¹⁷ The same is true for the astounding number of translations of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr into a wide variety of languages, including Indonesian.

3 A Short Publication History of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr in Indonesian

The Islamic market for printed books has grown tremendously in most Muslim-majority countries since the 1970s, despite the simultaneous flourishing of other media such as audio and video tapes and the internet. Mass literacy has expanded the circle of potential readers while desktop publishing has significantly lowered the bar for professional publishing. As a result, Islamic books have become a commodity for publishers with commercial interests, often with print runs that far exceed those of literary classics.¹⁸

When we look at the website of Gema Insani, one of the largest Islamic publishers in Indonesia, we find that most of their best-selling titles are children’s books, advice literature, and editions of the Arabic Qurʾān (muṣḥaf), which are doubtlessly more easily marketable than multi-volume works of tafsīr. However, one of their five main categories of products is called maraji, or religious reference works. It includes many translations of premodern Arabic works, such as an abridged edition of the Ṣaḥīh al-Bukhārī, the complete ḥadīth collections by al-Nasāʾī, Ibn Māja, and al-Tirmidhī, and works by al-Shāfiʿī, al-Nawawī, al-Suyūṭī, and Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, mostly in abridged versions. And, of course, Gema Insani offer their own translation of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr. While the production and distribution of translations of Islamic “classics” has not yet received much attention from researchers within or outside Indonesia,¹⁹ there clearly is a market for such works, and Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr, with its eight translations into Indonesian, is a big part of it.

Publication of translations of Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary in the Indonesian language started in the 1980s. This was a time during which publishing in general, and Islamic publishing in particular, expanded significantly in Indonesia, responding to the general rise in literacy, the establishment of a capitalist economy and the emergence of an affluent urban middle class that was disenchanted with politics but increasingly interested in religion. Already in the mid-2000s, there were at least several hundred Islamic publishers, most of them on Java, much in contrast to publishing activity in the early twentieth century which had had important centres on Sumatra. Nearly half of all publishing enterprises in Indonesia today specialize in Islamic print media. They offer a wide range of books, sold in big bookstores as well as street stalls and small stationery shops, with print runs that are typically significantly higher than those of, for example, non-religious prose literature. Translations of Arabic works have taken an important place in their portfolio from an early time onwards. The choice of works was often based on suggestions from students returning from the Arab World and Pakistan, with the result that modern authors affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood were featured prominently. In addition to that, from the late 1990s, premodern works of Islamic scholarship were translated more and more frequently in order to make them accessible to a broader public, beyond the students of Islamic schools. Many Islamic publishing houses, with the exception of those that address a target groups of liberal Muslim intellectuals, prioritize translations of Arabic works over original Indonesian works since Arabic religious literature enjoys great prestige and is therefore a valuable commodity.²⁰

The publication of Ibn Kathīr translations in Indonesia matches those general patterns of Islamic publishing in Indonesia that have been described in previous studies. A close look at their publication history also allows us to identify some new trends that have occurred since the mid-2000s, when the most recent significant study on the topic was published.

The first translation of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr was printed during the earliest stage of Islamic publishing activities in Indonesia, probably in 1981, by the small Surabaya-based publisher Bina Ilmu, with many subsequent editions in Indonesia and also in Malaysia.²¹ The next wave of translation and publishing activity occurred in the reformasi period after the end of Suharto’s reign in 1998, when the previously tight government control of religious expression was relinquished. It included an abridged edition of Ibn Kathīr by one of the largest and oldest Islamic publishers in Indonesia, the above-mentioned Gema Insani (1999),²² as well as the only unabridged translation into Indonesian by the publisher Sinar Baru Algensindo from Bandung (2000–c. 2007).²³ All three publishers—Bina Ilmu, Gema Insani, and Sinar Baru Algensindo—offer a mix of original Indonesian and translated books that include anything from Arabic Muslim Brotherhood texts to works on Sufism and books by proponents of early Islamic modernism such as Muḥammad ʿAbduh. They thus seem to target an unspecific Muslim audience that is religious but not exclusively committed to a particular ideological trend.

This is in marked contrast to those publishers that, starting the 2000s, printed Ibn Kathīr translations as part of a Salafi program that has a heavy focus on Saudi authors. For example, Pustaka Imam Asy-Syafiʾi describes itself as a publisher that spreads the true teachings of the Sunna, based on the understanding of the salaf, by producing translations of Arab and especially Saudi authors with a focus on Salafi doctrine and dakwah. Their abridged Ibn Kathīr edition, first printed in 2001, is based on the work by a descendant of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–1792).²⁴ In 2006, Pustaka Ibnu Katsir, a publisher with a similar agenda, including the promotion of face veiling for women, followed with a translation of the abridged Arabic edition by the Indian-born sheikh Muḥammad al-Mubārakpūrī that is distributed by the Riyad-based publisher Dār al-Salām.²⁵

In 2015, the publisher Insan Kamil printed a fairly extensive translation of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr that is part of a publishing program focusing on prototypical Salafi authorities such as Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Kathīr and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292–1350), ḥadīth, the lives of the prophet’s companions as well as contemporary Saudi authors. When compared to the two previously mentioned publishers, the Salafi orientation is just as obvious, but there is a noticeable shift from correct doctrine towards practical piety: the portfolio has a focus on prayer books, advice literature, and especially on works about gender issues and family ethics that target women. Another novelty is the fact that Insan Kamil’s Ibn Kathīr translation has no named translator; it has been prepared by an editorial team instead. Moreover, it is more aggressively marketed than previous editions, with a direct imperative to buy it on the back cover.²⁶

Both aspects—the aggressive marketing and the translation by an anonymous editorial team—appear to reflect a recent trend towards commodification that is mirrored in two editions from the 2010s by Islamic publishers that do not specifically follow a Salafi agenda, Jabal and Maghfirah. The focus of Jabal is on prayer books and Arabic Qurʾāns, and accordingly, their translation of Ibn Kathīr, which was first printed in 2012, is typeset and marketed as a muṣḥaf with added commentary, contained in one thick volume.²⁷ The Jakarta-based publisher Maghfirah offers a wide range of titles, mostly translated from Arabic, with a focus on Egyptian and Saudi authors who convey conservative messages in a modern garb. The Saudi ʿĀʾiḍ ʿAbdallāh al-Qarnī’s (b. 1959) self-help book “Don’t be sad” (Lā taḥzan) is a big hit, as it is for Insan Kamil. Maghfirah’s 2016 Ibn Kathīr edition²⁸ is the most aggressively marketed of all translations of this Qurʾānic commentary. Entitled “The Easy tafsīr by Ibn Kathīr”, it has bullet point lists on the front and back cover that praise the edition’s strengths: the authenticity of its ḥadīth material, the comprehensible language, and the fact that it covers the entire Qurʾān, making it the best way to understand the Qurʾān without hardship or confusion. It also contains a gift certificate to be filled by the buyer, indicating an envisaged target buyer who is looking to present it to a pious friend or even love interest. The portfolio and self-description of Maghfirah²⁹ as well as the introduction and presentation of their Ibn Kathīr edition reflect a combination of religious and entrepreneurial spirit that seems characteristic of contemporary Islamic publishing in Indonesia. Everything about the Maghfirah translation, which is the most recent edition of Ibn Kathir’s tafsīr on the Indonesian market, suggests that certain Salafi convictions, such as the pre-eminence of the first three generations of Islam whose understanding of the Qurʾān contemporary Muslims must follow, have become broadly marketable in Indonesia. They have merged with the longstanding prestige of the turāth (“heritage”) of classical Islamic literature which, according to the publisher, today’s umma must draw on in order to properly understand Islam. This framing allows for the inclusion of broader trends beyond a narrowly-defined Salafi-Wahhabi approach but is bound to privilege Arabic works over Indonesian ones.³⁰

4 The Indonesian Ibn Kathīr: An Imperfect Perfect Exegete

Most modern editions of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr position Ibn Kathīr as the preeminent exegetical authority but, paradoxically, at the same time consider his work to be in need of revision, sometimes even rewriting. The Indonesian Islamic publishing market is no exception. Seven of the eight Indonesian translations of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr are abridged versions of his commentary, but some also contain additions. The translations therefore differ vastly in length. The shortest one is also the earliest one, that by Bina Ilmu. The Gema Insani and Jabal editions have also been massively shortened. On the other end of the spectrum, the only complete translation is the one by Sinar Baru Algensindo. From among the abridged versions, the translations produced by Salafi publishers retain the highest proportion of Ibn Kathīr’s original text, especially the Insan Kamil edition.

The influence of the Arabic Islamic publishing market on the Indonesian one is substantial, as is the prestige that Arab contributors provide. Six of the eight translations—with the exception of the complete one by Sinar Baru Algensindo and the near-complete one by Insan Kamil—are based on an abridged Arabic edition.³¹ The Arab editor is frequently highlighted in the publisher’s marketing. For example, Pustaka Imam asy-Syafiʾi displays the name of the editor, ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Isḥāq Āl al-Shaykh prominently on top of the cover. Gema Insani has the name of the editor, the Syrian Salafi sheikh Muḥammad Nasīb al-Rifāʿī (1912–1992), on the cover in a position that makes it appear as if al-Rifāʿī is the author and Ibn Kathīr’s name is simply part of the title of the tafsīr. On the back cover, Gema Insani sing the praises of his edition and point out that it was based on encouragement from “Middle Eastern ulama.” The extensive front matter includes any number of endorsements from Arab ulama, mainly from Saudi Arabia but also from a range of other countries. Pustaka Ibnu Katsir not only invokes the authority of Sheikh Ṣāfī al-Raḥmān al-Mubārakpūrī (1942–2006), the head of the editorial team, but also that of the modern ḥadīth scholar Muḥammad Nāsir al-Dīn al-Albānī (1914–1999) “and other ḥadīth scholars” on the cover. Even Insan Kamil, who publish a near-complete translation that is not based on an Arabic abridged edition, invoke the authority of Arab scholars such as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saʿdī (1889–1957), Ibn al-ʿUthaymīn (1929–2001) and Aḥmad Shākir (1892–1958) on the back cover, and the front matter contains a “certificate of accuracy” by a Cairo-based “Dār Ibn al-Haytham.” This creates the somewhat surprising impression that modern Arab scholars and institutions are needed to lend additional authority to the work of a classical exegete, and in some cases, such as the Gema Insani edition, they even appear to trump the exegete’s authority.

This is related to a dilemma faced by most publishers: While endorsing Ibn Kathīr as a supreme exegetical authority, they simultaneously see the need for correcting his exegesis. Such need for correction is surprisingly often explicitly stated, for example by saying that Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr had to be “purified” or “authenticated.”

This is in spite of the praise that is heaped upon this tafsīr in cover texts and introductions. According to their own statements, the publishers agree with each other in that the foremost reason for its excellence is its ḥadīth-based method that conforms to Ibn Taymiyya’s paradigm of studying the Qurʾān through the Qurʾān, ḥadīth, and the traditions about the companions and successors. It is authentic (ṣaḥīḥ) and does not confound readers with isrāʾīliyyāt and weak traditions. Some editors claim that Ibn Kathīr was the first to interpret the Qurʾān through the Qurʾān (tafsīr al-Qurʾān biʾl-Qurʾān). Many of them also point out that his tafsīr is useful, helps people understand the Qurʾān and is the most authoritative reference work in Qurʾānic exegesis. This is not only relevant in an academic but also in a practical sense: Muslims are expected to follow the first generations, instead of merely learning about them, and Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr is portrayed as a tool to achieve that goal; it provides guidance in addition to knowledge. Some publishers praise Ibn Kathīr’s clear and logical method and the careful way in which he weighs exegetical opinions against each other (tarjīḥ). While several forewords point to Ibn Kathīr’s great expertise in a variety of fields besides tafsīr and ḥadīth, especially fiqh, but also ʿaqīda, history, and language, Gema Insani cites the Arab editor al-Rifāʿī with the opposite opinion, namely, that Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr is not muddied by other disciplines, which is probably a jibe against the likes of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. This is only a minor disagreement, however. The editors are unanimous in their assessment of Ibn Kathīr as a great and authoritative exegete, or even the greatest and most authoritative. Several of them undergird this with statements from other authorities such as Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (849/1445–911/1505), Muḥammad al-Ṣābūnī (1930–2021), or “the curricula of Islamic universities in many countries.”

More words are spent on arguing the need for revision and explaining the changes that have been made.³² Based on the explanations given by the publishers and editors in the introductions and cover texts, it is possible to identify some trends. The main reason given for the need to revise Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr is related to ḥadīths: “weeding out” weak ḥadīths is the most common self-stated aim, often with reference to authorities such as al-Albānī on whose opinion this process is based. The desire to delete redundant ḥadīths and shorten or delete isnāds is nearly as common a goal. Three editions moreover mention the removal of isrāʾīliyyāt. Salafi themes are thus very prominent.

Other types of text that fell victim to abridgment are only mentioned by individual editors, such as qirāʾāt, minority opinions and dogmatically unacceptable interpretations, especially about the attributes of God. Here, we see clear differences between the editions. For example, Maghfirah is concerned with removing technicalities such as discussions of qirāʾāt, whereas Pustaka Imam asy-Syafiʾi even claim that they added technical information missing from the original work, including qirāʾāt, the sources of ḥadīths, and a commentary on some missing verses.

Gema Insani and Maghfirah are explicitly concerned with improving the clarity of the tafsīr and making it comprehensible to non-specialist readers. Maghfirah even praise their abridged edition for having restructured Ibn Kathīr’s commentary, despite the fact that they also raise the somewhat doubtful claim that Ibn Kathīr’s language is simple and easy to understand for contemporary lay readers even without editing. In any case, the accessibility of the text to average Muslim readers is a key concern for these two publishers.

Based on the picture of Ibn Kathīr that the publishers and editors paint and on their description of their revisions, it is possible to identify the following four approaches:

1. Heavily abridged editions for readers with a general interest in the Qurʾān that do not subscribe to a particular ideological agenda nor display a marked concern with the methods of exegesis, translation and abridgment (Bina Ilmu, Jabal). They present Ibn Kathīr as a nondescript premodern exegetical authority and do not frame the method of abridgment in terms of Ibn Kathīr’s supposed shortcomings.

2. A complete edition that has been published in thirty inexpensive booklets and seems to target students in Islamic schools or universities (Sinar Baru Algensindo). It has the same non-critical approach to Ibn Kathīr as the aforementioned editions.

3. Editions focused on a guidance-oriented approach (Maghfirah, Pustaka Imam asy-Syafiʾi). The editors state their goal as helping Muslims understand the Qurʾān according to the understanding of the salaf, which requires simplification. In their framing, the main shortcoming of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr is its length and complexity. They do mention the presence of “unnecessary” material in his tafsīr but the focus is on simplification, rather than correction.

4. Salafi editions whose publishers treat Ibn Kathīr’s commentary as an imperfect tafsīr in need of revision or at least additional explanation especially in the one area they give him most credit for, which is ḥadīth scholarship. Even Insan Kamil, who claim to deliver an unabridged translation (although this is not entirely true), frame their edition as particularly valuable because al-Albānī’s evaluation of ḥadīths has been added. Even more strikingly, Pustaka Ibnu Katsir’s translation of Mubārakpūrī’s edition carries the correction and authentication in the title: Shahih Tafsir Ibnu Katsir. Their entire marketing is based on the premise that this edition contains nothing but authentic and correct ḥadīths that have been sifted both by Mubārakpūrī’s team and once again by the Indonesian publisher, based on additional sources. The potential inclusion of weak ḥadīths or a mix-up between ḥadīths and traditions on persons other than the prophet are seen as serious threats here. Going even further, Gema Insani’s edition that is based on al-Rifāʿī’s highly abridged Arabic edition boasts the direct interference with doctrinally problematic content, citing all the Salafi buzzwords: the ʿaqīda of the salaf, tawḥīd, the avoidance of bidaʿ and so forth. It is particularly in this category that Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr is framed as an important but inherently problematic work.

Of course, the editors’ and publishers’ statements about their methods of revising and translating Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr do not provide conclusive evidence of the criteria that actually guided their work. Some of these statements are rather detailed and others extremely short and vague, and even those that are detailed should not be taken at face value. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the minutiae of translation, revision, annotation, restructuring and abridgment that the editors and translators of each of the eight Indonesian versions of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr have undertaken. It is clear, however, that none of them give readers the full story regarding the extent of the changes they have made, as the next section will show.

5 The People of the Elephant: Modes and Pitfalls of Abridgment and Translation

1. Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the people of the elephant?

2. Did He not utterly confound their plans?

3. He sent ranks of birds against them,

4. pelting them with pellets of hard-baked clay:

5. he made them [like] cropped stubble. (Q 105)³³

Ibn Kathīr’s interpretation of Sūrat al-Fīl (Q 105) is relatively lengthy and the range of sources he draws on is diverse, going far beyond the simplistic ḥadīth-versus-isrāʾīliyyāt dichotomy that his modern editors are so fond of. Ibn Kathīr, who was also the author of a famous universal history, is first and foremost interested in the purported historical background of the sūra, namely, the campaign of the Christian King Abraha from Yemen against Mecca in the year of Muḥammad’s birth, which ended in Abraha’s defeat through divine intervention. In Ibn Kathīr’s interpretation, this shows God’s blessing to the Quraysh and was a sign of Muḥammad’s impending mission. Ibn Kathīr then presents in detail the story of the campaign based on Ibn Isḥāq’s (d. 150/767) prophetic biography, including some poems that were allegedly recited by characters in the story. He supplements Ibn Isḥāq’s narrative with additional, and sometimes conflicting, information from other sources.

In the next section of his commentary, he lists around twenty short traditions on early Islamic authorities about the meanings of individual words, phrases and grammatical constructs in the sūra. This includes a brief discussion of the nature of the birds that were pelting stones or stone-hard pellets at the invaders. He then moves to the conclusion of the story, provides some additional details about persons featuring in it, discusses (and rejects) an alternative version of the narrative according to which Abraha himself did not take part in the campaign, and quotes three pre-Islamic Arabic poems about the event. Only at the end does he cite two short ḥadīths, one from al-Bukhārī and one that is contained in both ṣaḥīḥ collections. According to these ḥadīths, Muḥammad mentioned the campaign of the people of the elephant and the sūra that describes it on two different occasions. Ḥadīth scholarship is thus only a marginal part of Ibn Kathīr’s commentary on Sūrat al-Fīl.³⁴

The way in which Indonesian editions edit, abridge and present Ibn Kathīr’s commentary on this sūra is an interesting case study because the bulk of the commentary is free of ḥadīths, weak or otherwise, and of stories of Jewish or Christian origin, nor does it discuss doctrinal matters. As such, most of the elements that the editors, publishers and translators of the Indonesian editions explicitly consider problematic are not present here. At most, the commentary contains a few differences of opinion among historians and a few variants of traditions on the meanings of particular terms or expressions.

The Indonesian editions display a vastly divergent level of interference with the source text, of course, depending on their length and general editing strategy.³⁵ Yet some clear patterns emerge when we break down Ibn Kathīr’s commentary into segments and systematically compare the extent to which the Indonesian editions abridged or changed Ibn Kathīr’s interpretation.

First of all, from the thirty-seven segments that I identified, there are only two—and rather short ones, at that—which survive unscathed in all editions: a prayer in the form of a poem of only two couplets’ length by Muḥammad’s grandfather ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib and the second of the two ḥadīths in the end. In the first case, this is probably because ʿAbd al-Muṭtalib seemed like an important personality even to those editors who did otherwise not think much about deleting the bulk of the historical narrative in the commentary. As for the ḥadīth in the end, it concerns a statement of Muḥammad at the occasion of the conquest of Mecca and is contained in the collections of Muslim and al-Bukhārī, which obviously means that no editor considered its authenticity doubtful or its presence in the commentary superfluous. Every other segment of this tafsīr, which in the Arabic edition I used covers eight pages, has been abridged or deleted by at least one editor, and usually by several of them. This is even true for the first of the two prophetic ḥadīths mentioned at the end, which is missing in two of the Indonesian editions, maybe because Ibn Kathīr had already cited it in his commentary on a previous sūra.

Some types of content are deleted at a conspicuous frequency, in the vast majority of editions. On top of the list are the pre-Islamic Arabic poems: all but the unabridged edition by Sinar Baru Algensindo delete some or most of them. Another poem, this one ascribed to a participant in the battle, Nufayl, is shortened in half the editions and completely deleted in one of them. It seems as if the editors consider poetry superfluous, difficult to read, difficult to translate, or all of those things—unless the poem in question is framed as a prayer by ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib as mentioned above.

The editors are also decidedly unenthusiastic about the lengthy section that contains semantic and grammatical explanations. Here, Ibn Kathīr basically lists a large number of concise opinions that have been transmitted from early Islamic authorities. While only one edition completely eliminates it, most editors shorten it significantly and delete a substantial part of the opinions. They are particularly prone to doing so in the last part of the section when the traditions cited by Ibn Kathīr are less of a philological and more of a mythological quality, for example describing the birds that attacked Abraha’s army. In one tradition, Ibn Kathīr cites Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid and ʿAṭāʾ as having likened those birds to phoenixes (ʿanqāʾ mughrib). This is omitted by all but the Sinar Baru Algensindo and Insan Kamil editions. In these two editions, the translators clearly suspect that the Indonesian readers might not know what a phoenix is. The Insan Kamil edition therefore adds a description, whereas the Sinar Baru Algensindo translators render it as “an eagle (burung garuda) that is known in the Maghreb”—which is most likely a misreading of the Arabic attribute mughrib as maghrib. The translations are full of such misunderstandings, more on which will be said below.

Most editions significantly shorten Ibn Kathīr’s historical narrative, especially towards the end. Many of them are skeptical of variants, alternative narratives to that of Ibn Isḥāq, and differences of opinion, for example regarding the number of elephants in the invading army. A brief excursus explaining the name and further fate of the elephant herder is eliminated by nearly all editors, and even more unpopular is Ibn Kathīr’s discussion of an alternative historical opinion according to which Abraha was not part of the army. It is fairly clear that from the point of view of the Arab and Indonesian editors, an important part of what constituted tafsīr and historical scholarship to Ibn Kathīr – a large corpus of sources, philological detail, discussions of opposing views, and conflicting opinions – is deemed to be unimportant or confusing to contemporary readers. The Maghfirah edition goes so far as to eliminate all references to alternative opinions.³⁶

It is not always clear whether the translators even recognized the way in which Ibn Kathīr, who assumed that his readers were familiar with the genre conventions of tafsīr, added to his main narrative variants or additions that go back to different sources. For example, when telling the story of the reason for Abraha’s campaign against Mecca, Ibn Kathīr narrates Ibn Isḥāq’s account, according to which the Quraysh were angry because Abraha had built a church in Sanaa that was meant to replace the Kaaba as the main site of pilgrimage on the Arab peninsula. Subsequently, one of the Quraysh entered Abraha’s church and defecated in it. This angered Abraha and he vowed to destroy the Kaaba. Ibn Kathīr then interrupts the flow of the story by adducing a different version going back to Muqātil b. Sulaymān who claims that some Quraysh lit a fire in the church and due to the prevalence of strong winds that day, it destroyed the church. After this insertion, Ibn Kathīr returns to the main narrative, describing Abraha’s preparation for the afore-mentioned campaign. That this is the campaign he vowed to undertake in response to the defecation, and not a part of the story about the fire, would not necessarily be clear to anyone unfamiliar with the genre conventions and Ibn Kathīr’s use of sources, and it is not clear to the majority of translators either. Two editions simply omit Muqātil’s version, thereby eliminating the problem, but in five of the remaining six, it is not recognizable as an alternative version or insertion and is seamlessly connected to the subsequent part. The Sinar Baru Algensindo edition even connects the story of the fire with the beginning of Abraha’s campaign by saying that it was “because of this incident” (“karena peristiwa itulah”) that Abraha readied his army, an expression that is not part of the source text. The translators’ lack of understanding of Ibn Kathīr’s method is bound to create confusion because readers are now confronted with two mutually exclusive narratives that are presented as parts of the same story.

In the same context, many translators’ surprisingly limited command of Arabic becomes obvious. Only two out of eight editions correctly translate the Arabic verb aḥdatha as “to defecate”: Bina Ilmu has buang air besar and Maghfirah has membuang hajatnya.³⁷ The remaining translators were apparently unfamiliar with the term and tried to derive the meaning from better-known semantic fields connected to the root ḥ–d–th: “to cause a riot” (Gema Insani, Pustaka Ibnu Katsir, Insan Kamil), “to destroy the interior of the church” (Pustaka Imam asy-Syafiʾi), or “to talk” (Jabal), which makes no sense at all. Half the translators also misunderstand Ibn Kathīr’s expression baʿḍuhum as denoting “some of them [the Quraysh]” when, in this context, it clearly means “one of them.”

Another example where the majority of translators have difficulties understanding the source text is Ibn Kathīr’s introductory paragraph about the relevance of the story. He says about the People of the Elephant wa-kānū qawman Naṣārā wa-kāna dīnuhum idh dhāka aqrab ḥālan mimmā kāna ʿalayhī Quraysh min ʿibādat al-awthān. The sentence is somewhat elliptic but from the context, it is clear that he means “they were Christians, and their religion was at that time closer [to Islam/ the true religion] than the worship of idols practiced by the Quraysh.” He goes on to argue that, despite the religious superiority of the attackers, God granted the victory to the Meccans as a portent of Muḥammad’s birth and in order to protect his family. Out of six translations that contain this segment (the Jabal and Bina Ilmu editions having deleted it), five translate it as meaning that the Christian faith of Abraha’s people was at that time close, or closer, or closest, to the idol worship practiced by the Quraysh, which completely defies the logic of Ibn Kathīr’s argument. Only Pustaka Ibnu Katsir translate this line correctly.

Furthermore, several editions suffer from sloppy typesetting or transliteration. The most egregious case of the latter is the Insan Kamil edition where Ibn Kathīr is said—on the back cover, no less—to be “an exegete from Baṣra” while he was, in fact, not from Baṣra in Iraq but from Buṣrā in Syria; and the important early transmitter al-Suddī is misspelled as as-Sadi, which reveals the translator’s lack of familiarity with the material. In the Sinar Baru Algensindo edition, names are frequently mixed up; for example, Muḥammad b. Kaʿb becomes Muḥammad b. Isḥāq and Ibn Hishām becomes Ibn Hāshim.

All in all, it is thus safe to say that the quality of the translations is rather low. There is no single edition that is free of the types of errors discussed here.

6 The Marketability of Books in the Age of Apps

Why would eight different publishers go to the trouble of producing voluminous editions of a premodern Qurʾānic commentary yet dispense with the effort needed to ensure adequate quality? Obviously, none of these editions is based on a quest for academic rigor, yet publishers must consider them commercially viable. And the fact that every single one of the translations has seen more than one edition³⁸ and that none of them were out of stock in 2020³⁹ does attest for a lasting commercial viability.

Why, though? Despite the relative importance of Islamic publishing, Indonesia is not exactly famous for its book culture.⁴⁰ And would people in the beginning of the 2020s not simply use electronic versions, especially smartphone apps?

During two searches in September 2020 and January 2022, Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr was available on Google Play Store (but not in Apple’s App Store⁴¹) in multiple Indonesian versions. In 2020, there were eight, two of them in a Pro version that cost a small fee, and most of them with ads. Their content was identical, namely, an occasionally faulty and probably pirated OCR version of the Sinar Baru Algensindo edition that was arranged by sūra and verse number and in most cases searchable but otherwise not particularly well-designed or functional. By January 2022, a few of those versions had disappeared and there were some new ones, including two that contain scans of the Imam asy-Syafiʾi edition as PDF files, which are available all over the internet⁴² and probably also pirated. The app format offers no added value to this content at all. This is somewhat different with an app that purports to offer a “thematic” version of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr.⁴³ It contains a list of topics for each of which a small number of segments of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr of individual verses may be consulted. All of them are, again, based on the Sinar Baru Algensindo translation.

None of these apps are very professional nor have they been developed with a thought to realizing the full potential offered by this type of media. Apparently, while some quick money might be made by placing smartphone apps of an existing digital version of a text on the market, there has been no attempt to move significantly beyond what the printed versions of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr offer, let alone to produce new translations specifically for the internet.

The investment in Ibn Kathīr apps is evidently low, and this might be because there are certain functions of a book that an app cannot fulfil and that buyers of this Qurʾānic commentary are looking for. According to Muzakki, books continue to be important media in Islamic publishing because they better represent the normative-dogmatic claims of Islam than, for example, music or films. They embody longevity, rather than ephemeral impressions.⁴⁴ Books are a commodity, a physical object that can increase the prestige of its owner and serve as a status symbol.⁴⁵ Watson argued in 2005 that some of the output of Islamic publishing houses, targeted at students of universities and urban pesantren, might be meant for display on a bookshelf, rather than reading.⁴⁶ Regarding the translations of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr, their physical properties and presentation corroborate that suspicion, at least in most cases. Six out of the eight editions come in multi-volume, glossy, hardcover box sets, decorated with Arabic writing and made to impress. There are two exceptions. The unabridged Sinar Baru Algensindo edition consists of thirty inexpensive softcover booklets, conforming to the parts (ajzāʾ) of the Qurʾān. They resemble textbooks for students of Islamic schools, and the target group probably consists of students with a limited budget and an interest in reading an extensive tafsīr.⁴⁷ The somewhat opposite case is the Jabal edition which is highly abridged and presented more as an extension of the Qurʾānic text than an independent tafsīr work, for which reason it comes in one thick volume. These two editions might actually be meant to be perused by their buyers, rather than put on a shelf; for the others, this is not as clear.

The suspicion that the production of quality content might not have been a key consideration for publishers is undergirded not only by the low quality of the translations but also by the relatively careless way in which the pages hidden inside the glossy cover have been produced. For example, the Bina Ilmu translation comes on low-quality paper and the pages are bound in the wrong order. The text of the Gema Insani edition seems to have undergone an inaccurate OCR. None of this would be important to buyers who are primarily aiming to place the books on a bookshelf. The gift certificate with which the Maghfirah edition is equipped points to buyers who are looking to impress the recipient, who in turn might be hoping to impress others.

7 Conclusion

The Indonesian translations of Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary have been produced in a climate characterized by the increasing commodification of religion. In a social context in which Muslims express their religious identity through purchasing and displaying certain goods, buying a multi-volume tafsīr may be a performative act that increases the buyer’s status, and producing such works may consequently become profitable for publishers. This is dependent on the visibility of the product. Without such visibility, it would lose its performative value, for which reason apps are not suitable to assume the functions of the printed books. The increasing visibility of religious status objects further drives the Islamization of society that has contributed to the rising demand for such items in the first place.⁴⁸

And yet, whether or not buyers actually read these books, their content matters. It is no coincidence that it is Ibn Kathīr’s name that adorns the cases of so many multi-volume box sets by various Islamic publishers. Modern editors and publishers have successfully positioned Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr as a source of guidance, as the marketing and framing of the Indonesian translations show. Ibn Kathīr’s work has been transformed from a specialist, encyclopedic Qurʾānic commentary to a textbook for a mass market.

It is by no means certain that all the publishers discussed in this chapter were cynically using substandard translations of Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary to fleece Muslim readers, as parts of my analysis might suggest. Some of them, while lacking professionalism, appear to have a genuinely religious agenda. That agenda is in line with Salafi ideas about the purity of the first generations of Islam and the precedence of ḥadīth over the reasoning of later-generation scholars.

However, my findings somewhat complicate the hypothesis, described in previous research, that the Wahhabi-Sufi divide is a defining feature of the Indonesian book market.⁴⁹ It would be tempting to situate the Ibn Kathīr editions on the Wahhabi side of this dichotomy. This, however, would be too simplistic. While three of the publishers of Ibn Kathīr translations clearly have a Salafi-Wahhabi agenda in the sense of promoting literature that conforms to the state ideology of Saudi Arabia (at least in the shape in which it was expressed before the mid-2010s), others lean towards Muslim Brotherhood literature, and some have no clear ideological agenda at all.

According to Fealy, producers who want to reach a mass audience “need to pitch their messages to have broad appeal and thus avoid narrow or exclusivist imagery and language.” They therefore tend to “avoid messages based on a narrow definition of what constitutes a ‘good’ Muslim.”⁵⁰ Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr seems to have been successfully positioned in that middle ground, as an embodiment of Arabic-Islamic scholarship and a central work of guidance. Despite differences between the ideological stances of the publishers, the eight Indonesian editions of Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary have much in common in terms of marketing and their framing of Ibn Kathīr’s methods and merits. Specifically, all of them place the quest for pure and authentic sources about the exegesis of the salaf at the center of what a “good” tafsīr should do.

This suggests that some key ideas of Salafism have become a central part of “Muslimness” in Indonesia. They are certainly not unrivaled; the Indonesian book market offers many alternatives to Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr, from premodern and contemporary, Indonesian, Arab, and South Asian exegetes, and new translations continue to hit the market. But when looking for a full tafsīr on the website of Gramedia, Indonesia’s largest bookseller, the Maghfirah translation of Ibn Kathīr comes up first, before the works of Muhammad Quraish Shihab’s (b. 1944), Hamka (1908–1981), the Jalālayn and al-Ṣābūnī.⁵¹ The translations of Ibn Kathīr are everywhere. Purchasing the Damascene scholar’s work has become an easy way for contemporary Indonesian Muslims to express their religiosity, and this was only possible because publishers, editors and translators made the choice to abridge, simplify and commodify it.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the American Academy of Religion for awarding Younus Mirza and myself a Collaborative International Research Grant which enabled us to pursue our interest in the modern multilingual career of Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr. Moreover, my heartfelt gratitude goes to Fadhli Lukman and Yulia-ningsih Riswan for helping me obtain most of the Indonesian translations of Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic commentary, which was no easy task. Given the number of volumes of these editions, it was, in fact, quite a heavy one.