Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān, by Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 310 AH / 923 CE). The earliest of the great commentaries to survive whole. Al-Ṭabarī sets out every opinion he knows on a verse with its chain of transmission, then rules between them. His reports on 4:157 are the oldest record of how the substitution at the cross was understood.
The complete commentary on She who guarded her chastity (21:91), covering 21:91.
On 21:91
On the interpretation of His words: And she who guarded her chastity: We breathed into her of Our spirit, and We made her and her son a sign for the worlds (91) (21:91)
God, Exalted be His mention, says to His Prophet Muḥammad (peace and blessings be upon him): And mention her who guarded her chastity (farj), meaning Mary daughter of ʿImrān.
By His word guarded (aḥṣanat) He means: she preserved her private parts and kept them from what God had forbidden her to permit therein.
There was disagreement about the farj which God, Majestic is His praise, meant that she guarded. Some of them said: He meant by it her own private parts, that she preserved them from indecency.
Others said: He meant by it the opening of her shift, that she kept Gabriel from it before she knew that he was the messenger of her Lord, and before recognition of him was established for her. They said: What indicates this is His words so We breathed into her, which follow upon His words And she who guarded her farj; they said: so it is known thereby that the meaning of the passage is: “And she who guarded the opening of her garment: We breathed into her of Our spirit.”
Abū Jaʿfar said: The more fitting of the two opinions in the interpretation of this, in our view, is the opinion of those who said: she guarded her private parts from indecency, because that is the more prevalent of its two meanings and the more apparent in the outward sense of the words. We breathed into her of Our spirit: He says, so We breathed into the opening of her shift of Our spirit. We have mentioned the disagreement of those who differed about the meaning of His words so We breathed into her elsewhere, together with the opinion closer to correctness in that matter, earlier in this work, in a way that dispenses with repeating it in this place.
As for His words and We made her and her son a sign for the worlds: He says, and We made Mary and her son a lesson for the worlds of their time, that they might take a lesson from them and reflect upon their affair, and so know the greatness of Our authority and Our power over whatever We will. He said “a sign” and did not say “two signs”, although He mentioned two signs, because the meaning of the passage is: We made the two of them a token and a proof for Us; so each one of them, in respect of indicating God and His great power, stands in the place of the other, since their affair in indicating God is one.
About this text
This is a complete English rendering of Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān on these verses, prepared for this website from the public-domain Arabic text (tafsir.app, src=tabari). Nothing is abridged: every opinion, every report with its chain of transmission, every verse of poetry and every grammatical note is translated. Qur’anic quotations are in bold; the translator’s own notes are confined to the numbered footnotes and identify names, terms and variant readings only. A second translator has not checked the rendering, and the Arabic is linked so that any passage can be compared. The modern editors’ apparatus is not part of the classical text and is not translated.
She who guarded her chastity (21:91): all commentaries · The classical commentaries