The Shaykh composed this tafsir in 1344 AH, at the age of thirty-seven. He then followed it with numerous other works on Qur’anic exegesis. In 1368 AH, when he was sixty-one—and after he had spent a blessed lifetime (1) authoring, compiling, studying, and pondering the Qur’an—he decided, on the advice of some well-wishers, to abridge his earlier commentary. He restricted it to a carefully selected set of verses that cover the Qur’an’s principal themes, sciences, and objectives, and thus produced the volume now before us: Taysir al-Latif al-Mannan fi Khulasat Tafsir al-Qur’an (Facilitating the Grace of the All-Kind: A Concise Qur’anic Commentary).

In this work the Shaykh adopted a pioneering approach to exegesis—namely, thematic (mawḍūʿī) tafsir of the Noble Qur’an—so his book has become one of the most beneficial and distinguished commentaries in this field. It gathers the most important subjects of the Qur’an and of Islam: doctrine, acts of worship, transactions, ethics, narratives, and the Prophetic biography.