of a judicial opinion as less than certain, but probably closer to the truth of the matter under investigation.
To be sure, the Quran, as the revelation from God, enjoyed a superior position in
the hierarchy of sources given for the derivation of legal rulings. Hence, more so than the traditions, the Quran could provide a methodological breakthrough in as‌ certaining the validity of the juristic deduction that "whatever is affirmed by reason‌ ing is also affirmed by the revelation." This latter rule is known as the "rule of cor‌ relation" (qa idat al-mulazama), which allowed a jurist to infer a ruling purely on the basis of reason.٣٠ In other words, there was no reason to deny a substantial role for reasoning in unraveling the effective causes behind divine legislation ( ilal al‌ sharayi), in order to guide the future concerns in society.
It is important to bear in mind that the contextual exegesis of the Quran, founded
on its major ethos as a "living" guide for the believers, was quite often overshad‌ owed by the restrictive traditions ascribed to the Prophet, in which the ability of human reasoning to discover the philosophy of legislation was circumscribed by an insis‌ tence on authoritative traditions to reveal divine purposes for humanity. For jurist‌ theologians like al-Khui, deeply rooted in the study of legal theory in which reason played a significant cognitive role in distinguishing objective good and evil, it was obvious that contemporary juridical deliberations to illuminate the divine intention in legislation were bound to be deficient without a creative interpretation of the evi‌ dential function of the Quranic text in its most immediate sense. Hence, al-Khui took it on himself to compose a multivolume exegesis of the Quran, on the basis of his awareness of the need for such a treatment from the perspective of a legal theorist. Unlike another major work on the Quranic exegesis by his contemporary, Allama Mul)ammad I:Iusayn TabatabaI, whose interests in his al-Mizan fitafsir al-quran (The Scale of Interpretation in the Exegesis of the Quran) were far more compre‌ hensive-including theological, philosophical, mystical, and linguistic expositions of the Quran-al-Khuis interests, as is evident in this book, were informed by his preoccupation with Muslim legal thought. The first step was to establish the uninter‌ rupted transmission of the text to confirm its authenticity, after which it would be possible to argue for a fresh legal-theological exegesis. This is exactly what this book, the original volume and this first published translation of al-Khui s work, seeks to accomplish.

The Quranic Exegesis

Al-Khuis book is entitled al-Bayanfi tafslr al-quran (literally, The Elucidation of the Exegesis of the Quran, but technically, The Prolegomena to the Exegesis of the Quran); it is among the less well known of his publications in the area of legal methodology and application. I was a visiting scholar in the Faculty of Sharia at the University of Jordan in ١٩٩٠-٩١ when I received a personal message from the Aya‌ tollah al-Khui from Najaf, Iraq, through his son, Sayyid Mul)ammad TaqT, request‌ ing me to undertake this translation. My first reaction was that there existed a large body of works, in English, on the history of the Quran and on the specific issues related to its interpretation. and, hence, that this book would add very little to