Muqatil's sermon

I'd like to go more deeply into Muqatil's Quran. As Nicolai Sinai writes about that tafsir, the German savant does us all the service of translating the whole of sura 84's exegesis into English.

I find hard to label Muqatil's work as a "commentary" as such, although explanation of the text does happen in it. Muqatil is more interested in sermonising for his theology from the text. He always has the greatest respect for that basis; when, say, sura 67 gets grossly anthromorphic about God, he'll be anthropomorphic too. Also, Muqatil doesn't much cite his predecessors, except God Himself. Traits like this rendered later exegetes suspicious of his work.

Men like Tabari found contemporaries who were better at marking back their own sources. This was often because these first "exegetes" were not even focused on tafsir: often they were jurisprudents, citing past lawyers, where Muqatil was drawing from storytellers or from a pious crib-sheet or simply from his own speculations. And why shouldn't Muqatil? Hadith wasn't his goal.

Muqatil did have a following. His student al-Hudayl bin Habib transmitted his master's opus faithfully, being careful to say "I didn't hear this Muqâtilan" or "X told me from Y that..." where he needed to supplement it. Samarqandi's tafsir used Muqatil heavily. It may be that it survived precisely because it didn't bog the reader in isnads and controversies: it just entertains and edifies.

In al-Hudayl's transmission, Muqatil endorses the canonical Qur'an with no variance in the order or chapters, nor in its text. I do however wonder if that was the order his master intended. The tafsir's expansion of sura 84 draws from other suwar, especially sura 69; and Muqatil presents it all as a response to the unbelievers' comments in Q. 56:47. The Ibn Mas'ud sequence of suwar was also available in his time - it is very nearly available in ours, as witness Codex Mashhad. The Muslims also report an "Ibn 'Abbas" transmission of the Quran, that which organised the suwar in order of their occasions-of-revelation. I can't help but wonder if Muqatil, writing sermons rather than a true tafsir, arranged it similarly. Precisely because he was not claiming to edit the word of his Lord.

It would then be up to succeeding generations to sort Muqatil "properly" - just like the Codex Mashhad. Where Muqatil's base Quran differed textually from the emerging consensus, al-Hudayl would "fix" it. Muqatil was, as noted, becoming difficult to defend in the mosque (although the Muslims wanted to keep reading it). Rather like later Shiism, this tafsir couldn't challenge the Sunni text.