Reading Tabarī's tafsīr in terms of social and cultural context

The reading of the social and cultural context is based on the idea that a commentator cannot act independently of his human characteristics, and therefore his belongings as a member of society and culture are reflected in his exegetical activity. Therefore, the study of the mufsīr treats knowledge as a whole, as an alternative to independent biographical analysis and analysis of his exegetical works. Accordingly, he argues that biographical data shows that the mufassir's personal biography exists within the social biography of the period in which he lived, and that the interaction of these two biographies influences the activity of tafsīr. Therefore, he aims to integrate the scattered biographical data with periodical readings in order to see the mufassir in his social and cultural context. Ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, one of the most important figures of early tafsīr, made his living in the third-century ʿAbbāsī society by managing the financial savings inherited from his father and did not hold a state position. Ṭabarī's life, which met his personal needs in economic terms with this accumulation, expanded his acquaintance with the riḥlīs he made to acquire knowledge and wrote his tafsīr in this process. With the method he adopted, Ṭabarī combined hadīth narration and linguistic knowledge in one text and was directly or indirectly taken as an example for the commentators of his time and after him. Ṭabarī does not present his personal observations and opinions about the social and cultural events of his time, as Faḫruddīn Rāzī and Ḳurṭūbī did, in accordance with the framework he drew for the boundaries of the tafsīr text. On the contrary, he includes the social and cultural events of his time in the text if they are within the boundaries of the science of tafsīr and will serve the understanding of the Ḳur'ān. However, the most important principle here is that there is no content that would overshadow the tafsīr in terms of textual dominance.