allahu.cipher

Al-Khattab undertook an exegetical work called Al-Tafsir al-Shamil fi Maarafat al-Kamil, or The Complete Exegesis Toward an Understanding of the Divine Perfection. It began simply enough, aiming for a comprehensive synthesis of the preceding centuries’ scholarship on Qur’anic interpretation. Al-Khattab was well into the third volume and the exegeses on the Chapter of the Cave, Surah 18, when he faced a problem that would consume him and nearly unravel his faith altogether.

In his investigations, he came upon an earlier tafsir that addressed criticisms of the Qur’anic text, specifically accusations of Muhammad’s alleged plagiarism of the Dhul-Qarnayn story from oral versions of Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Alexander romances that were extant during the prophetic period. It seems that al-Khattab became convinced by these arguments, and that the Dhul-Qarnayn story was an Islamized variation of an earlier popular Alexandrian fiction, a view crippling to the conventional understanding of divine revelation.

After a period of severe doubt and a long disruption in the compilation of his tafsir, Al-Khattab seems to have taken a novel turn. He retained the conviction that the Dhul-Qarnayn story in Surah 18 was, in fact, a fiction based upon a fiction, but that this represented a crucial understanding about divine revelation and the nature of the Qur’an: it is story evolving from story, and pushing forth into still new stories. This meant that the divine revelation was not just the narratives contained in the book of the Qur’an itself, but all the stories that they were derived from. He asserted that the revelation couldn’t properly be understood outside of this broader revelatory context.

Al-Khattab gathered all the texts he could find that preceded the familiar Qur’anic narratives, and then the stories that informed those earlier versions as well.

This tafsir exploded to 25 volumes before Al-Khattab made yet another more dramatic turn: he asserted that the true Qur’an is not just the body of the words revealed by Muhammad, nor just that plus the earlier texts that informed that text, but all the potentialities for reiterating the stories contained within them in all their permutations.

Al-Khattab would spend the rest of his life, some 45 years, composing story after story, each a variation on its Qur’anic precedent, until his study overflowed with bound parchment running into the hundreds of volumes. Only a small portion of this grand exegesis has been published, a fraction of that in critical translation.