This paper explores the first Qur’an interpretation published by a woman, Bint al-Shati’s two-volume al-Tafsir al-Bayani li-l-Qur’an al-Karim (1962/1966). A widely circulated text, eleven new editions and re-publications appeared between 1962 and 2008. Bint al-Shati’s other works enjoy similar broad popular appeal. Her biographical Nisa‘ al-Nabi (Wives of the Prophet) was re-published over twenty times between 1961 and 2015 in Cairo, Beirut, Lahore, and Singapore. Bint al-Shati laid the foundation for a new generation—and a new genre—of religious literature more accessible to popular audiences. Yet her immense intellectual production has gone virtually un-mined. There has been a plethora of fine scholarship by and about Muslim women in English, but far less about women exegetes writing in Arabic. In her exegesis, Bint al-Shati uses a linguistic and literary lens, rather than a gendered one, to interpret early Meccan suras. Her work challenges the idea that women’s contributions to Islamic religious discourse should only be on topics that directly address women and gender. This is emblematic of other women-authored tafsirs that followed, by Egyptians Ni‘mat Sidqi, Zaynab al-Ghazali, and Kariman Hamza, all writing in Arabic. This contrasts with English language tafsirs by Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Aysha Hidayatullah. This paper explores how Bint al-Shati’s contribution worked within a gendered framework, but also to transcend it. Bint al-Shati’s Qur’an interpretation is important not just because she was a woman breaking into a male dominated field. She also positioned herself within her era’s contentious debates about literary approaches to Qur’an interpretation. She furthered the literary method of Qur’an tafsir developed by her husband and mentor Amin al-Khuli, as well as her advisor Taha Husayn and colleagues Muhammad KhalafAllah and Sayyid Qutb. Like Qutb, she explores the Qur’an’s aesthetic and sensory elements as a mode of conveying its spiritual depths. In this way she embraces classical ideas about ta’wil or esoteric interpretation as a key to the Qur’an’s mysteries. But she also does so through modern, almost structural, approaches to the Qur’anic text as an organic unity. She gestures to classical theorists like al-Baqillani, even while engaging the luminaries of her age. Bint al-Shati made Qur’an interpretation accessible to modern audiences, with her engaging focus on its aesthetic dimensions as indicative of the Qur’anic miraculous inimitability.