Osmanlı Son Döneminde Suriyeli Bir Müfessir -Cemâlüddîn el-Kâsımî ve Mehâsinü’t-Te’vîl Adlı Tefsiri-

A Syrian Exegete in The Late Ottoman Period -Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī and His Tafsīr Mahāsin al-Ta’wīl-

Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī, one of the scholars of the Damascus geography who lived in the last period of the Ottoman Empire, is an important scholar who packed nearly a hundred works into his fortynineyear life. Although he is known as a Salafist exegete, his work, Mahāsin al-ta’wīl, which is the subject of this study, shows that he was actually multifaceted and open to different understandings. The author, who is mostly known for his reformist personality, was one of the prominent figures among the reformists of the period due to his works in fields such as hadith, theology, and tafsīr. This study, which deals with the method of interpretation of the Qur’an in al-Qāsimī’s tafsir Mahāsin al-ta’wīl, consists of an introduction and three chapters. In the first part of the study, information is given about the political, social, scientific and economic situation of the century in which the author lived. His family, sect, teachers and students who influenced al-Qāsimī’s scholarly personality, as well as his life and works are analyzed. The content and method of his tafsīr, which is one of the author’s nearly one hundred works and has a large content of seventeen volumes, and the method he used to express his own interpretation in the tafsīr were determined. The sources and other sources of the tafsir and the postgraduate studies conducted in Turkey and abroad about this tafsir were investigated. In the second part of the study, Mahāsin al-ta’wīl was analyzed in terms of the theoretical aspect of the narration and dirāyah method, which are considered as methods of exegesis, and the application dimension of this theory was revealed. Thus, the reflection of al- Qāsimī’s previous tafsir tradition and scholarly accumulation on his tafsir is analyzed. In the last part of the study, the author’s tafsir method was analyzed in terms of Qur’anic sciences. In this context, the method of using more than twenty Qur’anic sciences in Mahāsin alta’wīl has been evaluated.

Keywords: Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī; Mahāsin al-ta’wīl; Tafsīr; Rivāyah; Dirāyah; ‘Uloom al-Qur’an.