The Path to a Black American Radical Tafsir

Thinking Outside the Box

Mahmoud Andrade Ibrahim

I begin with a confession and a question.

The confession is this: For centuries, the Qurʾān has been read primarily by the powerful, for the powerful, and in the interest of the powerful. The scholars who shaped the canon of tafsīr (exegesis) and fiqh (jurisprudence) were, with rare exceptions, men of privilege, court scholars, urban elites, beneficiaries of empires that stretched from Andalusia to India. They were not the poor. They were not the enslaved. They were not the colonized. And when they opened the Book of Allah, they saw what their position allowed them to see: a text that legitimized hierarchy, codified patriarchy, and consecrated the authority of those who already held power.

The question is this: What happens when someone else reads the Qurʾān? Not the emperor, but the orphan. Not the slave master, but the slave. Not the colonizer, but the colonized. Not the man who owns the land, but the woman who works it and is not paid. What happens when the reader of the Qurʾān is the mustad'af, the one whom the Qurʾān itself calls "the oppressed of the earth"?

This effort is an extended answer to that question. It is an argument for a method of reading the Qurʾān that I call the Hermeneutics of Liberation.

The Problem with "What the Text Says"

Before I can explain what the Hermeneutics of Liberation is, I must first name what it is not. It is not a rejection of the Qurʾān. It is not a denial of Islamic orthodoxy. And it is not a claim that previous generations of Muslim scholars were frauds or fools. On the contrary, I affirm the Qurʾān as the uncreated speech of Allah, the final revelation to humanity, and a complete guidance for those who fear Allah. I also affirm that the classical scholars, al-Tabari, al-Qurtubi, Ibn Kathir, and others, were giants of learning whose contributions to Islamic civilization are incalculable.

But giants stand on the ground. And the ground on which classical tafsir was built was not neutral ground. It was the ground of empire, patriarchy, and class hierarchy.

Consider the following: The great age of Islamic legal and exegetical canonization (roughly the 8th to the 11th centuries CE) coincided with the consolidation of the Abbasid Caliphate, a slave-owning, war-making, tax-extracting imperial state. The scholars who wrote our foundational commentaries lived in societies where slavery was legal, where women had limited legal personhood, where non-Muslims paid the jizya as a mark of subordination, and where the poor were expected to know their place. These scholars were not monsters. Many of them were sincerely pious men who sought to please Allah. But they were also men of their time, and their time was not, and is not, our time. Their time was a time of hierarchy.

The tragedy is that their interpretations, like prehistoric fossils,  have been frozen in amber. A medieval ruling about women's testimony, a medieval justification for slavery, a medieval deference to political authority, these have been passed down as if they were divine decrees rather than human judgments shaped by historical context. The result is that the Qurʾān, which came to liberate, has been used to chain. The Book of Justice has been read as a book of quietism. The reminder of the oppressed (mustad'afin) has been recited by oppressors who did not recognize themselves in the mirror of the text.

The Hermeneutics of Liberation begins with the conviction that this cannot be what Allah intended.

The Spirit Over the Letter

I worked in a community in Brooklyn,NY, and I remember bringing up this very discussion. The Imam of that community had a lot of difficulty wrapping his head around this idea. This kind of elasticity was not something that his Shaykhs of Medina had trained him to grasp.

Every scripture can be read in two ways: by the letter or by the spirit. The letter is fixed. The spirit moves.

The letter says: "Cut off the hand of the thief" (5:38). The spirit asks: What makes a society produce thieves? Is hunger theft? Is poverty theft? Would a just society need to cut off hands at all?

The letter says: "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women" (4:34). The spirit asks: *Protection from what? Maintenance on whose terms? Does this verse describe an eternal hierarchy or a temporary economic arrangement in 7th-century Arabia?*

The letter says: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah" (9:29). The spirit asks: Who is "those"? Was this a specific command for a specific war against specific aggressors? Or is it a timeless license for religious violence?

You see the difference. The literalist reads the text as a set of static rules to be applied uniformly across all time and place. The liberationist reads the text as a dynamic conversation between the divine and the human, a conversation in which the core values (justice, mercy, compassion, equity) are constant, but their application changes as human circumstances change.

The Prophet  ﷺ himself modeled this. He did not apply the 7th-century laws of Arabia to 6th-century Arabia. He lived in his time. He wore his people's clothes. He ate their food. He married within their customs. And when circumstances changed, when the Muslim community moved from persecution in Mecca to sovereignty in Medina, the rulings changed. Slavery was not abolished overnight, but its conditions were radically restricted. Women's rights were not made equal to men's overnight, but they were radically expanded. The Qurʾān did not fall from the sky as a completed legal code. It fell as guidance, a compass, not a map.

The Hermeneutics of Liberation takes the compass seriously. It asks: What is the direction of the Qurʾān? Toward justice or toward hierarchy? Toward the freeing of slaves or toward their continued enslavement? Toward the empowerment of women or toward their subordination?

***** Once you answer that question, and the answer is unmistakably toward justice, freedom, and mercy, then you have your hermeneutic principle. Any interpretation that leads to greater oppression is a misinterpretation, regardless of how many scholars and centuries stand behind it. Any interpretation that leads to greater liberation is a sound interpretation, regardless of how novel it appears.

Reading with the Mustad'afin

This brings me to the most important methodological commitment of this work: the priority of the oppressed.

The Hermeneutics of Liberation does not pretend to be neutral. There is no neutral reading of a text that speaks about justice. To read "neutral" is to read from the position of the powerful, because the powerful are the ones who can afford the illusion of neutrality. The slave cannot afford neutrality. The colonized woman cannot afford neutrality. The prisoner cannot afford neutrality. They already know which side they are on. They are on the side of their own liberation.

The Qurʾān is on their side. Explicitly. Repeatedly. Unequivocally.

Allah says: "And We desired to show favor to those who were oppressed (mustad'afin) in the land, and to make them leaders and inheritors" (28:5). Not "maybe" or "sometimes" or "under certain conditions." We desired to show favor to the oppressed.

Allah says: "What will make you understand what the steep path is? It is the freeing of a slave, or feeding on a day of severe hunger an orphan near of kin or a needy person in misery" (90:12-16). The steep path, the path to Allah, is not ritual purity. It is feeding the hungry and freeing the captive.

Allah says: "And do not incline toward those who do wrong, lest the Fire touch you" (11:113). Incline toward the oppressor? Sit at the table of the powerful? Accept the legitimacy of Pharaoh's court? No. The command is to stand apart, to stand against, to stand with the oppressed even when it costs you.

The Hermeneutics of Liberation is therefore not a value-neutral academic exercise. It is a committed reading. It commits in advance to the side of the mustad'afin. It reads every verse as if the orphan, the widow, the prisoner, the colonized, the racialized, the poor, and the woman are the intended audience. It asks: What does this verse mean for someone who has been told they are less than human? What does this verse mean for someone whose children are hungry? What does this verse mean for someone whose back has been whipped?

This does not mean the Qurʾān has no message for the powerful. It does. The message for the powerful is: Repent. Free your slaves. Feed the poor. Stop exploiting. Stop killing. Stop hoarding. Or face the Fire. But the powerful rarely listen. And the history of Qurʾānic interpretation has too often been written by powerful men explaining to other powerful men why the verses about oppressors do not really apply to them.

This text reads differently. It reads from the bottom of the well, with Joseph before he was raised to power. It reads from the furnace, with Abraham before he was saved. It reads from the slave market, with Bilal before he was freed. It reads from the prison, with the people of Pharaoh before the sea parted. It reads from the perspective of those whom history has crushed, because that is where Allah says the believers are found.

What This Text Is Not

Let me be clear about what this effort is not, so that no one can accuse me of hiding my intentions.

This is not an attack on Islamic law (shari'a). It is an attack on the misuse of Islamic law to justify oppression. There is a difference. The maqasid (higher objectives) of the shari'a are well known: the protection of religion, life, intellect, lineage, and property. Notice what is not on that list: the protection of patriarchy, the protection of slavery, the protection of empire, the protection of racial hierarchy. The classical jurists added those. Allah did not.

This is not a rejection of the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ . It is a recovery of the Sunnah that the quietists have buried. The Prophet was not a man who told the oppressed to be patient while their oppressors feasted. The Prophet was a man who broke idols, who redistributed wealth, who freed slaves, who raised the status of women, who stood against the powerful of Quraysh until they either converted or fled. His Sunnah is not a thobe and a kufi. His Sunnah is resistance.

This is not a call to abandon the Qurʾān. It is a call to return to the Qurʾān, to read it as if it were actually the word of Allah, not the word of 9th-century jurists. If Allah is just, then Allahs word cannot be used to justify injustice. If Allah is merciful, then Allah's word cannot be used to justify cruelty. If Allah is the Liberator, then Allah's word cannot be used to justify chains.

A text that is read and interpreted by oppressors becomes an oppressor's text. A text that is read and interpreted by the oppressed becomes a liberator's text. The Qurʾān is the same. The difference is in the reader and the method.

An Invitation

I do not expect every reader to agree with everything in this work. I am not writing for agreement. I am writing for awakening.

The Qurʾān says: "And Allah puts forth a parable: a city that was safe and secure, its provision coming to it in abundance from every place, but it denied the favors of Allah. So Allah made it taste the garment of hunger and fear for what they had been doing" (16:112).

The Muslim world,and the Black American Muslim community in particular, has been tasting the garment of hunger and fear for a long time. We are not safe. We are not secure. Our provision does not come in abundance. And too many of us have been taught that this is Allah's will, that we should be patient, that our reward is in jannah, that we should focus on our prayers and leave politics to the politicians.

That teaching is a lie. It is a lie told by the powerful to keep the powerless quiet. And it is contradicted by every page of the Qurʾān that speaks of justice, mercy, and liberation.

The Hermeneutics of Liberation is not a luxury for academics. It is a necessity for the oppressed. It is the difference between a religion that anesthetizes and a religion that mobilizes. It is the difference between reading the Qurʾān as a chain and reading it as a key.

I invite you to read with me. Not from the throne, but from the dust. Not from the palace, but from the prison. Not with the scholars of the powerful, but with the prophets of the poor.