A mid-century Quran exegete, Amīn al-Khūlī has been rarely studied in Arabic or in English and has fallen through the disciplinary cracks of Quranic Studies. An influential thinker and a postcolonial advocate of anti-Eurocentrism and anti-Traditionalism, al-Khūlī’s main goal which he outlines in Manāhij Tajdīd (Methods of Innovation) is to create a radical restructuring of Islamic thought through a rigorous epistemic methodology that decolonizes the study of the Qur’ān and Classical Arabic from the recalcitrant mythologies of a hegemonic religious discourse. Al-Khulī’s method consists of a literary approach to the Qur’ān which examines it from two angles simultaneously: intrinsic and extrinsic. The intrinsic aspect of Quranic exegesis include a thorough analysis of figuration, style, and linguistic specificities. The extrinsic component consists of studying the history of the Qur’ān, including chronicling as the geography of revelation as well as other related Quranic sciences. Confronting political, traditionalist, and Eurocentric tools of knowledge production, al-Khūlī’s philological rationalism makes him one of the most revolutionary anti-colonial intellectuals in the Arab world who challenged al-Azhar, the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasserism, and European modernity, all at once. Critics of al-Khūlī fail to see that a crucial aspect of his theory is what could be loosely termed “the psychology of reception.” Anchoring the relationship between the Prophet and the Revelation in a psychological aesthetics of reception makes for one of the most innovative theories for asbāb al-nuzūl (Divine Causes/ Promptings of Revelation) to have originated in the last century. Al-Khūlī’s legacy invites us to investigate the grand context of colonialism and modernity, while his legacy still raises a number of vexed questions. Is the desire to deconstruct a reified and radicalized religious discourse itself a boomerang reaction to colonial modernity, that is, a critical and scientific return to fountain sources in order to liberate the “Islamic mind” from shameful mythologies à la Ibn Khaldūn? Or does this theoretical undertaking simply fall under a Fanonian or Bhabhan theory of colonial mimicry and is therefore nothing but a Manichean transfer of “la mission civilatrice” from a colonizing self to a colonized other? Is it a self-surgical look backward, or inward, namely with Eurocentric eyes, at a convoluted and archaic tradition that needs to be ‘smoothened out’ and rendered compatible with the so-called liberal, progressive, and secular practices of institutionalized European modernity? In other words, are we facing a re-tooling or a re-tailoring of Quranic tradition in al-Khūlī’s method of tafsīr?