Izzat Darwaza

Muhammad Izzat Darwaza was born into a merchant family in Nablus and was a founding organizer of the secret Arab society Al-Fatat in 1911. He served as secretary-general of the Syrian National Congress that proclaimed the independence of Syria under King Faisal in 1919 and co-founded the pan-Arab Independence Party (Hizb al-Istiqlal) in 1932.

Exiled for decades in Damascus, Darwaza produced a massive scholarly output exceeding fifty published volumes. His crowning theological achievement was Al-Tafsir al-Hadith, a revolutionary thirty-volume Quranic commentary that arranged the chapters in their chronological order of revelation to elucidate the historical development of the prophetic message.