Rashid al-Din Maybudi, author of this Sufi commentary on the Quran, was a major twelfth-century scholar of Maybud, near Yazd in central Iran. This commentary, called Kashf al-asrar wauddat al-abriar ('The Unveiling of the Mysteries and the Provision of the Pious'), is one of the earliest and longest commentaries on the Quran in the Persian language, though a good portion of it is in Arabic. Maybudi explains select verses and their allusions (ishara); by this he means the manner in which the words and imagery can be understood as pointing to various dimensions of the soul's relationship with God. Maybudi's work also came to be known by the subtitle of the published Persian edition, Tafsir Khawaja Abdallah Ansari (Quran Commentary of Master Abdallah Ansari) because Maybudi wrote it after having studied the Quran commentary of Ansari, an influential scholar and Sufi saint from Herat.

The volume is arranged in the order of the chapter and verses of the Qur'an and 1,500 pages of Persian text. There are 97 chapters, each corresponding to one Qur'anic chapter (which is to say that 17 of the short chapters do not have commentaries). Each chapter consists of explanations of from one or two to as many as 85 verses. Topics include most of the major issues in Islamic theology, metaphysics, cosmology, and spiritual psychology. The language is relatively simple and poetic, making the book much easier to access than any Qur'anic commentary now available in English, not to mention the numerous impenetrable tomes of Islamic thought.