Sunday, June 14, 2020

Muqatil's thesaurus

Nicolai Sinai writes about Muqatil's tafsir. Muqatil bin Sulayman was an early Sunni exegete under the first 'Abbasids. He held to the faith-foremost standpoint, arguing for that in his expansion on sura 84.

Muqatil (famously) didn't tell us where he got his own information from. He did have predecessors.

Sinai notes that where Muqatil glosses the text, rather than re-present it (for a sermon or a story), these glosses hold to a pattern. Sinai believes that these come from a dictionary. Some instances, perhaps, explain the Quran's Hijazi dialect to the classical Arabophones - those in Iraq. Mostly I detect an ideologic project: like, where our man turns "idhn" (will) to "amr" (command). Muqatil's God is perfect, so doesn't second-guess Himself.

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