In my work at Muslim Skeptic, I have frequently drawn upon the Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir) of the renowned scholar Mufti Muhammad Shafi (1897–1976), may Allah have mercy on him. As many of you may know, he is the late father of the contemporary scholar Mufti Taqi Usmani.

Mufti Muhammad Shafi is one of the most influential Sunni scholars of the modern Indo-Muslim world and the founding Grand Mufti of Pakistan. He was trained within the rigorous scholarly tradition of Darul Uloom Deoband. He combined deep mastery of the classical Islamic sciences with a penetrating awareness of the ideological and philosophical challenges posed by modernity, secularism, and Western intellectual paradigms.

His monumental exegesis Ma’arif al-Qur’an, originally written in Urdu, is especially significant because it does not merely reproduce earlier commentarial traditions. Rather, it synthesizes the inherited Sunni exegetical canon with a systematic engagement of contemporary social, political, and epistemological questions. The work remains firmly rooted in orthodox Sunni theology and jurisprudence while simultaneously addressing modern doubts, reformist reinterpretations, and the moral dislocations produced by secular modernity. In this respect, Mufti Shafi’s tafsir occupies a special and distinctive place among contemporary Qur’anic commentaries: it preserves methodological fidelity to the classical tradition without retreating into intellectual isolation from the modern world.

Likewise, in his livestreams and public lectures, brother Daniel Haqiqatjou has repeatedly recommended Ma’arif al-Qur’an as one of the most reliable and intellectually serious modern tafsir works available in the English language.

To highlight the depth and intellectual quality of this tafsir, I intend to comment upon Mufti Shafi’s commentary of Qur’an 2:124. This approach belongs to the long-standing Islamic scholarly tradition of supra-commentary in which scholars critically annotate, expand, interrogate, and synthesize earlier texts rather than merely summarizing them. Far from being a marginal or derivative genre, the supra-commentarial tradition constituted one of the principal engines of intellectual development in the Islamic civilization. Through layered commentary traditions, scholars refined conceptual distinctions, preserved interpretive continuity, and generated increasingly sophisticated discussions across disciplines such as jurisprudence, theology, logic, philosophy, grammar, and Qur’anic exegesis.

Modern Western academia has only recently begun to rediscover the intellectual significance of these traditions, particularly in fields such as philosophical theology, intellectual history, and manuscript studies. Earlier Orientalist scholarship often dismissed commentaries and supra-commentaries as signs of civilizational stagnation or “decline,” assuming that “originality” could only take the form of radically novel authorship. Contemporary scholarship, however, has increasingly challenged this assumption by demonstrating that the Islamic commentary tradition functioned as a dynamic dialectical enterprise in which innovation occurred through sustained engagement with authoritative texts. Academics such as Robert Wisnovsky, Asad Q. Ahmed, Khaled El-Rouayheb, and others have all contributed, in different ways, to overturning the outdated narrative that post-classical Islamic scholarship was merely “repetitive” or intellectually exhausted.

Mufti Shafi wrote the following commentary on ayah 2:124 of the Qur’an, “When Abraham’s Lord tested him with certain commandments, which he fulfilled…”:

We may add a few words for the benefit of those who are anxious to adopt unquestioningly the literary and philosophical mores of the West. Since the Second World War, the writings of the Danish man of letters and thinker, Kierkegaard (who was a dilettante in theology too), have been casting a sort of paralysing fascination over the sensibility in the West. Particularly his book “Fear and Trembling”, which deals with the trial of Sayyiduna Ibrahim (peace be upon him) avowedly in the manner of a psychological novel, is supposed to have triggered into action a number of Existentialist philosophies, and even to have furnished the point of departure for all modernistic Christian theology, specially of the Protestant persuasion.

 

Now, Sayyiduna Ibrahim, even according to the admission of Jews and Christians, a prophet, and not “l’homme moyen sensuel” which is the subject matter of the novel, of psychology, and, not the least, of the theology of the Dane.

 

Secondly, he did not merely have to go through emotional stress and strain, or through a problem of the conscience, or through a “crisis of identity”, the fear and the trembling, as the philosopher maintains, but was equally tried in the matter of faithfully observing divine injunctions.

 

Thirdly, when he knew that Allah had chosen him to be a prophet, he did not grow silent and secretive and lonely, as the fancy of our literary artist would have us believe, but proclaimed the fact to others. Without such a proclamation, he would not at all have been able to perform the function of a prophet. In fact, it has been said that “the Friend of Allah” would not take his daily meals until he had found a guest to share it with him. In short, all we wish to point out is that the nature of prophethood is a degree of reality which we can understand only partially and that too only with the help of Divine Books, and hence it is not a sphere in which human fantasy may be allowed to roam at its sweet will.

One cannot help but be struck by the remarkable concision with which Mufti Shafi summarizes the matter. His treatment demonstrates a level of mastery which allowed him to distill the essence of highly complex intellectual debates without sacrificing their decisive elements. Anyone familiar with the relevant philosophical and theological literature immediately recognizes how unusually precise and economical his formulations are.

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Novel

For example, in discussing Fear and Trembling, he observes that Søren Kierkegaard presents “the trial of Sayyiduna Ibrahim (peace be upon him) avowedly in the manner of a psychological novel.” At first glance, this may appear to be a simple literary observation, but it is in fact an extraordinarily perceptive characterization: modern literary theory has long associated the rise of the novel, particularly the psychological novel, with the emergence of secular modern subjectivity and the fragmentation of traditional metaphysical worldviews.

Georg Lukács, in The Theory of the Novel, famously argued that the novel is the characteristic literary form of a “transcendentally homeless” civilization, one in which the unified sacred cosmos of premodernity has collapsed and the individual subject becomes existentially isolated. Likewise, Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, connected the emergence of the modern novel to Protestant individualism, empiricism, and the social conditions of early bourgeois modernity. Similar themes appear in the work of thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin and René Girard, who each, in different ways, understood the novel as deeply tied to modern forms of subjectivity, interiority, and desacralization.

Seen in this light, Mufti Shafi’s characterization of Kierkegaard is remarkably penetrating. Fear and Trembling does not simply recount the Qur’anic or Biblical account of the sacrifice of Abraham (peace be upon him); it reconstructs the event through the lens of inward psychological anguish, subjective crisis, paradox, and existential isolation.

Abraham (peace be upon him) becomes less the prophetic exemplar situated within a sacred cosmological order and more the solitary individual confronting the absurdity of faith through radical inwardness. Mufti Shafi recognized that this literary and philosophical reframing was not accidental but, rather, that it reflected broader modern assumptions concerning subjectivity, religion, and meaning.

Existentialism

His second observation is equally as incisive. He notes that Kierkegaard and existentialism “furnished the point of departure for all modernistic Christian theology, specially of the Protestant persuasion.” Historically speaking, this is substantially correct. Existentialist categories became foundational for large segments of twentieth-century Protestant theology, particularly in its attempts to reconcile Christianity with secular modern consciousness after the collapse of traditional metaphysical certainties.

The influence of Kierkegaard can be seen clearly in theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann, whose program of “demythologization” sought to reinterpret Christianity in existential rather than metaphysical terms. Drawing heavily upon Heidegger, Bultmann argued that the truth of scripture lay not in objective supernatural claims but in the existential self-understanding awakened within the individual believer.

Similarly, Paul Tillich developed a theology centered on “ultimate concern,” interpreting God less as a transcendent being in the classical sense and more as the “ground of being” disclosed through existential anxiety, estrangement, and meaninglessness. One could also mention figures such as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and later existentially influenced Protestant thinkers who attempted, in different ways, to “preserve” Christianity within the intellectual conditions established by liberal modernity and secularization.

In this respect, Mufti Shafi accurately perceived a major historical development: existentialism functioned as a bridge between Protestant theology and modern secular consciousness.

Once religion became grounded primarily in inward subjective experience rather than in metaphysical certainty, revelation, sacred law, or ecclesial authority, theology increasingly adapted itself to the assumptions of liberal modernity.

The result was not merely a new theological vocabulary. It was a transformation in the very conception of religion itself, from an objective sacred order into an existential mode of self-understanding compatible with the secular age.

RELATED: The “Abrahamic Sacrifice” and Modern Ethics: Between Kant and Kierkegaard

Modernist Psychologization

What emerges from Mufti Shafi’s critique is, ultimately, a conflict between two radically different anthropologies: the anthropology of the modern existential subject and the anthropology of prophecy.

Kierkegaard interprets prophet Abraham (peace be upon him) through categories that are fundamentally psychological, subjective, and existential. Mufti Shafi, by contrast, insists upon a noetic and metaphysical understanding of prophethood.

The distinction is crucial. Modern psychology, particularly in its post-Enlightenment forms, tends to understand man primarily as an interiorized subject governed by emotion, anxiety, desire, alienation, and self-consciousness. The “self” becomes the central theater of meaning. In existentialism, this reaches its culmination: the individual stands isolated before an apparently fractured world, attempting to construct meaning through inward struggle, authenticity, and decision. Such a conception presupposes the social and intellectual conditions of modernity: radical individualism, the weakening of sacred cosmologies, the decline of metaphysical certainty, and the emergence of the autonomous bourgeois subject within capitalist society.

This broader transformation of consciousness has been analyzed in depth by Charles Taylor, particularly in A Secular Age and Sources of the Self, where he describes the rise of the modern “buffered self”: a self enclosed within its own interiority, increasingly detached from transcendence, and compelled to derive meaning from subjective authenticity rather than participation in a sacred cosmic order.

The prophetic consciousness, however, belongs to an altogether different order of reality. It is not psychological in the modern sense but noetic, from the Greek nous, referring to the intellect in its metaphysical and spiritual sense, the faculty of direct intelligibility and apprehension of truth. In the Islamic intellectual tradition, especially among theologians influenced by traditions of metaphysical epistemology, the higher intellect (‘aql) is not merely a calculative rational faculty but, rather, the organ through which transcendent realities are perceived. Prophetic knowledge is therefore not reducible to emotion, subjective crisis, or inward existential torment. It is grounded in certitude (yaqin), revelation (wahy), and direct orientation toward the Divine Reality.

This is precisely what Mufti Shafi seeks to preserve. Prophet Abraham (peace be upon him) is not a modern existential individual trapped within the anxieties of autonomous subjectivity. He is a prophet whose entire being is structured by tawakkul (trust in Allah), taslim (submission), and certainty in revelation.

The Qur’anic Abraham (peace be upon him) does not confront the command of sacrifice as a man abandoned within metaphysical uncertainty. Rather, he confronts it as one whose consciousness has already been transformed by prophetic election and intimate knowledge of Allah. His trial is therefore not primarily psychological but ontological and spiritual: it concerns perfect fidelity to Divine command, not the construction of subjective meaning.

This difference also explains why Mufti Shafi rejects the image of our prophet as a silent, isolated, inwardly tormented figure. The existential hero is fundamentally solitary because existentialism begins from the premise of the isolated self. But the prophet, in Islam, is never merely a private consciousness. Prophethood is intrinsically public because revelation necessarily establishes a relation between heaven and community.

The prophet proclaims, teaches, legislates, warns, and embodies Divine guidance within a social order. His inward certainty radiates outward into civilization itself. Hence, the traditional portrayals of Abraham (peace be upon him) emphasize generosity, hospitality, proclamation of truth, and communal orientation rather than introverted anguish.

Indeed, the modern tendency to psychologize prophetic experience often reflects the broader secularization of knowledge itself. Once transcendence becomes inaccessible to modern consciousness, revelation is reinterpreted in therapeutic, emotional, literary, or symbolic categories. Prophecy ceases to be an objective rupture of the Divine into history and instead becomes a drama of human inwardness.

In such readings, Abraham (peace be upon him) is no longer the khalil Allah (“Friend of Allah”) but, instead, a literary figure through whom “modern man” contemplates his own anxiety.

Mufti Shafi’s intervention is therefore not merely exegetical. It is civilizational and epistemological. He is defending the integrity of the prophetic worldview against categories produced by secular modernity. His argument implies that prophecy cannot be adequately understood through the conceptual instruments of modern psychology or existential literature because prophecy belongs to a mode of being in which man remains rooted in transcendence rather than enclosed within the self. The prophetic subject is not the self-authoring individual of modernity but, rather, the servant (‘abd) whose identity is constituted through relation to Allah.

For this reason, Mufti Shafi insists that “the nature of prophethood is a degree of reality which we can understand only partially and that too only with the help of Divine Books.” This statement is profoundly significant. It rejects the modern assumption that autonomous human reason or literary imagination can fully penetrate every dimension of reality. Certain realities, especially prophecy, require submission to revealed knowledge because they transcend the experiential horizon of ordinary secular consciousness.

Human fantasy, detached from revelation, cannot adequately comprehend prophethood precisely because prophethood belongs to a sacred ontology that is no longer accessible within the flattened metaphysics of modernity.

I insisted on writing this not merely to demonstrate that supra-commentary can constitute a rigorous intellectual exercise in its own right but also to remind Muslims of something that is too often forgotten: modern Muslim scholars were not intellectually defenseless before modernity. On the contrary, many of them engaged modern philosophical, theological, political, and cultural currents with remarkable depth, precision, and confidence, often on terms that are far more sophisticated than contemporary Muslims realize.

Mufti Shafi is only one example among many, albeit a very eminent one. The modern Islamic world produced an entire constellation of scholars who confronted the epistemological, moral, and civilizational claims of modernity while remaining firmly grounded in the classical Islamic tradition, wrestling seriously with secularism, liberalism, nationalism, scientism, existentialism, colonialism, and the fragmentation of religious authority in the modern age.

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