“[Moses] said, ‘My Lord, show [Yourself] to me, [so] I [can] look at You.’ He said, ‘You shall not see Me’” (Quran 7: 143). “[At a distance of] two bow-lengths or closer” (53: 9), then “at the lote tree of the utmost boundary” (53: 14), “[Muhammad's] sight did not swerve nor transgress, [and] he certainly saw of the greatest signs of his Lord” (53: 17–18). Sufi interpretations of these cryptic Quranic depictions of the visionary experiences of Moses and Muhammad form the “central point of interest” (p. 2) in Pieter Coppens’ excellent monograph Seeing God in Sufi Qur'an Commentaries. Vision of God is indeed the author's main focus. But by arguing that Sufi concerns with the end of time really centred around “the topic of meeting with and vision of God” (p. 3), Coppens expands the scope of his project to Sufi eschatology as a whole – again, as reflected in Sufi Quran interpretation – and also probes Sufi views on Paradise and Hell as well as Adam and Eve's banishment from Paradise to earth in order to develop a holistic understanding of Sufi perspectives on “boundary crossings” between this world and the otherworld. In the process, he also aims to throw new light on the subject of Sufi Quran commentary: is there such a genre distinct from mainline Quran exegesis, and if there is, can it really be characterized as Sufi, that is to say, based on experience, thus “subjective and original” (p. 4) in any significant way?

With such ambitious goals, Coppens wisely limits himself to five Sufi Quran interpreters of the Islamic Earlier Middle Period (c. 950–1250 ce): al-Sulamī (d. 1021), al-Qushayrī (d. 1072), Maybudī (probably d. first half of 12th c.), al-Daylamī (likely d. 1191 or 1193), and Rūzbihān al-Baqlī (d. 1209). He probes the relevant works of these authors – all in Arabic except for Maybudi's which is in Persian – and surveys their views on Paradise and Hell (Chapter 3), Adam and Eve's banishment from Paradise (Chapter 4), as well as Quran 7: 143 and 53: 1–18 (Chapters 6 and 7 respectively). In between these substantive chapters, Coppens gives an overview of theological discussions and early Sufi perspectives on the vision of God (Chapter 5), where he also reviews the non-exegetical works of his five Sufi authors for reflections on the same theme. These five central essays are book-ended with two introductory chapters (one on the scope, nature and methodology of the project (Chapter 1) and the other providing general contextual information on the five Sufi Quran commentators in question (Chapter 2)) and a succinct conclusion where Coppens outlines his major findings and points to avenues for future research (Chapter 8).

In both conception and execution, Seeing God in Sufi Qur'an Commentaries is an exemplary work of scholarship. Since tracing the contours of Sufi eschatology across Islamic history would clearly be an insurmountable task for any single researcher, it makes good sense for Coppens to narrow the scope of his project in both chronology and coverage to works of Sufi Quran commentary of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This enables him to come up with a viable and relatively coherent sample of Sufi texts that he mines effectively using the lens of boundary crossing between this world and the otherworld. He presents his findings in a lucid, admirably accessible, style, with ample and clear signposting; his attention to technical issues such as citation, translation, and transliteration is impeccable (this reviewer came across only five or six transliteration errors in the whole work, which is a remarkably low figure); and his contextualization of the five commentaries against the backdrop of the wider tradition of Quran interpretation along with his care to expand his gaze, within reasonable bounds, to the non-tafsīr works of his Sufi commentators, four of whom were prolific authors who left behind significant textual legacies, is nothing short of commendable.

Does Coppens achieve his research objectives? On the question of the nature of Sufi Quran commentary, he concludes that the five works he examines do indeed add up to a separate “genre” of tafsīr due to their genealogical interlinkages and the shared body of proof texts that they use, but he stops short of characterizing this genre as “Sufi” (p. 69). However, his extension of generic status to the corpus of works he analyses while declining to give this genre a name comes across as a half-hearted response to what is inevitably a much larger question about how we should categorize Quran commentaries written by Sufis, a question that calls for a correspondingly extensive analysis of the subject across the whole length of the tradition. In the absence of such a wide-ranging attempt, one is tempted to agree with the assessment of Jamal Elias from a decade ago that Sufi tafsīr works do not form a separate genre because they “do not follow a shared structure, nor do they reflect identical concerns or motivations in the acts and processes of commentary” (“Sufi tafsīr reconsidered”, Journal of Qur'anic Studies 12, 2010, 45 – Coppens cites this article). Why not settle for something like a “sub-generic offshoot” from the mainstream tafsīr genre instead, an offshoot that provides Sufi commentators “more room for innovation and subjective understandings” (p. 263) of Quranic verses?

As for Sufi eschatology, Coppens’ findings are more substantial and credible, if still somewhat modest and unsurprising. He successfully demonstrates that Sufi Quran commentators of the eleventh and twelfth centuries indeed displayed a “relative disregard … for the rewards and punishments of Paradise and Hell without denying their physical reality” and focused instead on the “concepts of nearness to and vision of God” (p. 257), all the while staying largely faithful to mainstream, on the whole Ashʿarī, theological positions (pp. 261–2). This is entirely in keeping with what one would expect from a bunch of well-educated Sufis who were thoroughly conversant with theological and legal scholarship of their era. Here, the real question is whether the sample of Sufi textual legacy Coppens used for his study is at all representative of Sufi approaches to eschatology as a whole, especially for later periods, but this is, as Coppens observes (p. 263), a broad research topic for the future. In the meantime, Seeing God in Sufi Qur'an Commentaries will serve as a solid foundation for all such studies to come.