Contesting Exegetical Authority: Scholarly Patronage, Power, and the Saudi Salafi Critique of al-Ṣābūnī’s Ṣafwat al-Tafāsīr

Abstract

This article examines the controversy over Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Ṣābūnī’s Ṣafwat al-Tafāsīr as a contest over who may speak for the Qurʾan, not simply as an inventory of doctrinal and technical errors. Using Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis within a qualitative, library-based case study, it reads the commentary alongside its two principal critiques, Muḥammad Jamīl Zaynū’s Tanbīhāt Hāmmah and the relevant section of Bakr Abū Zayd’s al-Rudūd, and connects their wording to the conditions under which they were produced, circulated, and received in Saudi Arabia. The analysis shows that al-Ṣābūnī’s synthetic-pedagogical method of selecting, condensing, and ordering classical commentaries accounts for both the work’s wide readership and its exposure to attack. The critics recast disagreements over taʾwīl, the divine attributes, hadith documentation, variant readings, and source selection as epistemic misconduct through a lexicon of taḥrīf, jahl, khiyānah fī al-naql, and departure from manhaj al-salaf. Endorsements, specialist consultation, book-supervision approval, and catalogues of refutation gave individual judgements the weight of a collective verdict. The article argues that the polemic set two regimes of exegetical legitimacy against each other: a synthetic-pedagogical regime that accommodates diverse sources selectively and a Salafi regime of textual purification that demands strict theological boundaries and verbatim fidelity in transmission. The available evidence supports a conclusion of institutional proximity and control over circulation more firmly than a claim that the state authored or ordered the critique.