تفسير
Tafsīr
Commentary on the Quran: explaining what its verses mean and how they were understood.
What it means
Classical commentators explained a verse first from the rest of the Quran, then from the Prophet’s explanations, then from the Companions, then from the Arabic language itself. The great early works include al-Tabari (d. 923) and Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), and each gathers earlier views rather than offering a single opinion.
A verse read alone, in English translation, may be read very differently from how its first audience and its scholars understood it.
Often misunderstood as
That any reader can lift a verse out and say what “Islam teaches”.
What the sources say
Muslims do not read the Quran as a list of separate sentences. The commentary tradition records the context, the grammar and the range of readings, and often shows that the apparently harsh or strange reading is not the one the scholars settled on. This is the reason this site sets objections beside the explanations that exist for them.