For fourteen centuries, the Qur’an has been commented upon in countless ways. Among these commentaries (tafsîr), those called “Sufi” hold a place apart. They seek less to explain the letter of the text than to explore its interior. What, exactly, is a Sufi tafsîr? Where does this way of reading come from — and where does it cease to be accepted by tradition?
An “allusive” commentary
Sufi commentaries go by several names, depending on the author and the nuance: ishârî (allusive — the most common), bâtinî (interior, esoteric), ʿirfânî (gnostic), ramzî (symbolic), kashfî (by unveiling). All point to one and the same gesture: reading beyond the apparent, toward a hidden meaning.
The most consensual term, ishârî, says it well: the verse does not “state” the spiritual meaning, it alludes to it. This is an essential difference of tone — the Sufi commentator does not claim, most of the time, to deliver THE meaning of the text, but to touch upon an inner resonance.
The foundation: a Qur’an with two faces
This reading rests on a traditional datum. Several hadiths, some of them rigorously authenticated, report that the Qur’an has a zâhir and a bâtin — an exterior and an interior, an apparent and a hidden. “Every verse has an exterior and an interior,” says one of them.
The idea is therefore not a foreign graft pasted onto the text: it claims a prophetic root. In the Shiite world, where esotericism is from the outset part of religion, one goes further still: “The Qur’an has an interior, and its interior has an interior, up to seven interiors.” The imam ʿAlî sums up this intuition in a formula: “The exterior of the Qur’an is elegant, and its interior, profound.”
Why read the Qur’an “from within”?
Because the Qur’an itself never ceases to speak of the inner being. It mentions the heart (qalb, fuʾâd) one hundred and forty-five times, and the breast (sadr) forty-six times. “It is not the eyes that grow blind, but the hearts within the breasts” (Qur’an 22:46). The science concerned with the human interior finds its source there directly.
One word makes this clear: taʾwîl, translated as “interpretation,” comes from a root meaning the origin, the beginning. To interpret, in the strong sense, is to bring back to the first origin — to recover the word as it is before it took the form of language. Now, to return to that source, one must purify the soul and clarify one’s gaze. Hence a central conviction of Sufism: one does not grasp the interior of the Qur’an with the intellect alone, but with a purified heart. As a verse puts it, they are “clear verses, in the breasts of those to whom knowledge has been given” (Qur’an 29:49) — knowledge is here associated with the heart.
Three degrees of reading
Here is the whole point: beneath a single label — “Sufi tafsîr” — lie very unequal realities. To see clearly, one can distinguish three degrees, from the most sober to the most daring.
First degree: the reading anchored to the text
This is the level all scholars accept, represented by masters such as Qushayrî (d. 465 H) — held to be the first “acceptable” Sufi commentator in the eyes of orthodoxy — or, later, Ibn ʿAjîba (d. 1224 H). With them, the outer meaning and the inner meaning keep a close link: the interior never contradicts the letter, it applies it to the life of the soul.
Take the words of Abraham: “When I fall ill, it is He who heals me” (Qur’an 26:80). Sulamî’s commentary reports what several masters said of it. Ibn ʿAtâ’: “When I fall ill through the sight of what is not Him, my cure is to return to the contemplation of the Real.” Jaʿfar: “When I fall ill by looking at my own actions, my cure is to remember divine grace.” Dhû l-Nûn: “When the harshness of creatures sickens me, the contemplation of the Real heals me.” None of these readings departs from the explicit sense: they simply transpose illness onto the inner plane — the illnesses of the soul. And the Qur’an itself authorises it, saying of sick hearts: “In their hearts is a disease” (2:10).
The procedure holds for any verse that may touch the soul. “O children of Adam, take your adornment at every place of prayer” (7:31): the adornment of worshippers, Qushayrî comments, is the traces of prostration; and the adornment of the hearts of the knowers, the lights of the divine presence. Better still: for a Ghazâlî, since the diseases of the heart are graver than those of the body, this inner reading is not merely licit — it is even more necessary than the literal one. At this first degree, spiritual exegesis is fully validated by orthodoxy, be it Sunni, Shiite or Ibadite.
Second degree: the grey zone
The links, at times, loosen. “Had We prescribed for them: ‘Kill yourselves’ or ‘Leave your homes,’ they would not have done it, save a few” (Qur’an 4:66). Sulamî reads: “kill your souls” by thwarting their passions; “leave your homes,” that is, drive the love of this lower world from your hearts; and that “few,” small in number but great in worth, are those brought near to God. The spiritual meaning remains sound if one considers the Qur’anic teaching as a whole — but its attachment to the letter of this verse becomes more tenuous: the link between “leaving one’s home” and “driving out love of the world” is no longer self-evident.
Likewise, “purify My House for those who perform the circuits” (2:125): the apparent order is to purify the sanctuary, says Qushayrî, but the allusion aims at the purification of hearts — as pilgrims circle the Kaaba, the hearts of the knowers circle the spiritual realities. Here the commentary no longer follows directly from the letter: it rests on a correspondence — the dwelling and the heart — that already presupposes metaphor. We are at the edge of meaning, in a zone hard to situate. This is also where the maxim so often repeated among Sufis belongs, “Die before you die”: an invitation to put the ego to death — foreign, it must be said, to the authenticated prophetic corpus.
Third degree: free hermeneutics
At the last degree, the link with the letter breaks frankly. The interpretation is no longer deduced from the text: it springs from an inspiration. This is what is called ʿilm ladunî, the “knowledge from God’s presence,” which by nature escapes all textual or rational control — and even becomes the norm with certain authors such as Qâshânî, Najm al-Dîn Kubrâ or Ruzbehân Baqlî.
An example: “He has set the two seas flowing… between them a barrier they do not cross” (Qur’an 55:19-20). Qâshânî reads in it the meeting, within man, of the sea of matter — salty, bitter — and the sea of the spirit — sweet and pure; the barrier is the animal soul that separates them without either encroaching on the other; and from their meeting are born “the pearls” of the spiritual sciences. Another example: “You will see the mountains, which you suppose to be motionless, passing as the clouds pass” (27:88). Where the classical commentary sees the upheaval of the Last Day, Baqlî reads the flight of the knowers’ souls toward the Kingdom. It is even told that the master Junayd, who remained motionless amid a spiritual concert where his companions were stirring, recited precisely this verse: outwardly still, his secret “was passing like the clouds.”
Such meanings rest on no textual source — neither hadith nor word of the first generations. The famous Hallâj even seemed to play with this: he supported certain teachings on unheard-of chains of transmission — “according to the truthful vision, according to the Wise King, according to the Preserved Tablet, according to Knowledge…” Irony? Be that as it may, this degree poses to orthodoxy a problem that is less of content than of guarantee: how to authenticate what claims a direct inspiration?
The real question: not the nature, but the source
This is the finest observation of this tradition: the boundary does not really lie in the nature of the interpretation, but in the credit one grants its source.
For the Qur’an and the Sunna themselves harbour readings one would swear were Sufi. The disconnected letters at the head of certain sûras (alif-lâm-mîm) are interpreted, from the earliest exegetes, as keys to divine names. And the account of the servant whom Moses joins — “a servant to whom We had granted a mercy and taught a knowledge from Our presence” (18:65) — founds the very idea of an inspired knowledge.
Islam, moreover, recognises the extraordinary: sainthood (wilâya), the charisms of the saints, those “inspired men” of whom a hadith of Bukhârî says that, if there be one in the community, “it is ʿUmar.” The debate is therefore not one of principle. What is self-evident for a prophet or a saint is not so for the ordinary believer: the whole question is to know which source of inspiration one may trust. A question of reliability, not of nature.
Symbol, the language of the sacred
The Qur’an declares in many places that God “sets forth parables.” Joseph interprets eleven stars, the sun and the moon as his own family. The symbol works through a kinship between two realities: a point of resemblance that links them in the world of archetypes.
Ghazâlî expresses it in his Niche of Lights: there is a correspondence between the visible world and the celestial Kingdom, such that there is “nothing in the former that is not a symbol of something in the latter.” This is why the Sufis, before the unsayable, often prefer to resort to symbol and allegory rather than to discourse.
One same orientation
Despite their extreme diversity, Sufi commentaries converge in a common orientation, with three faces.
A spiritual orientation first: the purification of the soul, the inner journey toward God, and all that attaches to it — remembrance, self-examination, trust in God. This is the base validated by all orthodoxy.
An ethical orientation next: the emphasis on virtue, wisdom and love, before any theological or legal consideration. As a result, the Sufi commentator looks upon man less as a judge than as a physician of the soul; his commentary draws a kind of cartography of the inner states of the being.
An ontological orientation finally: a vision that seeks to hold together God’s transcendence and His nearness — most often kept as a secret, beyond all duality.
Reading with the heart
To read the Qur’an “from within” is, in the end, to let the text become the mirror of the inner life. The stories of the prophets become the stages of a journey; the illnesses, those of the soul; the travels, those of the heart toward its origin. The whole prudence of the tradition consists in distinguishing what remains faithful to the text from what strays from it — without thereby denying that the Word, in its source, is without limit: “If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would run dry before the words of my Lord ran out” (Qur’an 18:109).
It is to this reading of the heart, demanding and luminous, that we initiate students in our online tafsîr courses — where the commentary always rests on the very language of the text.