Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁: The Sea of Knowledge

A new river

In the previous article we followed the mouth of Abu Hurayra ﵁ and the eight-hundred-voice choir of transmitters who drank from him directly, spread across Medina, Mecca, Sana’a, Kufa, Basra, Damascus and Egypt. We saw how his transmissions were fixed not only orally but also in ink, and how that multiple, geographically dispersed transmission undermines the claim that the hadith was a late invention. We closed with the observation that the umma did not draw from one source. Alongside the Medinan main artery, more than one river was already flowing in the first century after the Hijra.

In this article we follow another stream, and it is the broadest of them all. Not raised in Medina but rooted in Mecca and fanning out from Mecca. The stream of Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁.

Whoever has read the polemics of the twentieth century knows the standard reproach. Wansbrough and his successors claimed that in the first century after the Hijra there was no institutionalised teaching of hadith and Quran, that the umma lived in loose oral fragments, and that the so-called schools of Mecca, Medina and Kufa were only constructed in the second and third centuries out of polemic, to give later doctrines an early origin. A text without a school, a Book without a classroom. So ran the indictment.

Against that indictment the figure of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ stands as an immovable block. Not one student, but a series of transfer chains named by name: Azami ﵀ lists in his Companion catalogue alone nine who transmitted from Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ in written form. Not one book, but books by camel-loads. Not one subject, but fixed days for law, for Tafsir, for the Maghāzī. What Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ built up in Mecca and later in Ṭā’if was no chance circle around a storyteller. It was a curriculum. And the names of his students, Mujāhid ﵀, Sa’īd ibn Jubayr ﵀, 'Ikrima ﵀, ‘Aṭā’ ibn Abī Rabāḥ ﵀, Ṭāwūs ﵀, each stand separately in every classical biographical catalogue as the foundations of what the Tābi’ūn generation would become.

This article follows that river from its source. The child born in Mecca three years before the Hijra, the younger cousin who asked the Prophet ﷺ and kept asking, the young man who sat waiting on the doorposts of the Companions ﵃ until they came outside, the scholar who at the end of his life went blind and had his books read to him, and the school he left behind, which called into being the tafsir tradition of the umma.

The child in the house of the revelation

He was born in Mecca, in the bosom of Banū Hāshim, three years before the Hijra. His father was al-'Abbās ibn 'Abd al-Muṭṭalib ﵁, the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ and possessor of a trading fortune known throughout the Hijaz. His mother was Umm al-Faḍl Lubāba bint al-Hārith ﵂, reportedly the second woman to convert to Islam after Khadijah ﵂. His aunt was Maymūna bint al-Hārith ﵂, one of the Mothers of the Believers. One could not come closer to the Prophet ﷺ in Mecca without being of his direct offspring.

When the Prophet ﷺ passed away, the boy was about thirteen years old. No longer a child, not yet an adult, but at that hinge age at which memory is hard and attention undivided. What he had heard from the Prophet ﷺ, and what he had heard about the Prophet ﷺ in his mother’s house, had lodged itself in him as only a good child’s memory lodges something.

But what lifted him above the other children of his generation was not only his descent, and not only his memory. It was a supplication.

One evening, the detail is transmitted by his father and by himself and is widely known in the hadith literature, the Prophet ﷺ laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder, or in another transmission stroked his forehead, and spoke:

Two requests in one line. Faqqih-hu fi’d-dīn, give him fiqh, give him the deeper understanding of why Allah ﷻ commanded something. And 'allimhu at-ta’wīl, teach him the interpretation, the hermeneutics, the unravelling of what a Quranic verse really says.

What happened here was not ceremonial. It was prophetic in the literal sense. The Prophet ﷺ predicted, with the permission of his Lord, what this child would become. A man who would embody fiqh and tafsir together for the umma. And the umma has remembered it that way. From the moment he came of age, Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ received not one title but two: al-Habr, the Scholar par excellence, and al-Bahr, the Sea. The scholars of later times added a third, Tarjumān al-Qur’ān, the Interpreter of the Quran. But during his life it was above all that one title that stuck, al-Bahr. The Sea of Knowledge.

A sea does not gather of itself. A sea is fed by rivers, and every river comes from somewhere. Before we watch Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ become a sea, we must watch him dig for his sources.

On the doorpost of a scholar

After the passing of the Prophet ﷺ, the young Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ faced a choice that his contemporaries did not consciously make. The Companions ﵃ who had known the Prophet ﷺ from close by were limited in number and already advanced in age. What they knew sat in their heads and in a handful of fragments on parchment. If those heads were laid to rest, that knowledge went with them.

The boy understood that. He went to a friend from the Anṣār and proposed: let us go around together, let us seek out every Companion ﵁ still living, let us leave nothing unasked. The friend laughed at him. “Who will want to listen to you, boy, while the great Companions ﵃ are still among us?” He left Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ to his fate.

But Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ went.

He set out, and his method later became proverbial. When he heard that a Companion ﵁ knew a certain saying of the Prophet ﷺ, he went to that man’s house. He did not always knock. He did not want to disturb the man during his nap, during his prayer, during his meal. He sat down, with his cloak drawn around him, on the stone steps before the door. The heat of Medina, or later of Mecca, was no small trial. The wind that sometimes carried sand was even more troublesome. But the boy stayed seated.

When the resident finally came outside and found him there, he often exclaimed in astonishment: “O cousin of the Messenger of Allah ﷻ, why did you not knock? We would have come to you.” And the answer that Azami cites from the sources was always the same: “No, it is I who must come to you.” The later tradition added to this the maxim that knowledge comes to the seeker and not the seeker to the possessor of knowledge, a fine summary of his attitude, even though it does not stand in that form in Azami’s brief rendering of the conversation.

That is no scene from a romanticised hagiography. It is a working method. And it is a method the umma would copy for centuries afterwards. The student who travels to the scholar, not the scholar who besieges the student. The whole riḥla institution, the journey for the sake of knowledge, which in the second and third centuries after the Hijra would become so essential a part of the teaching of hadith, found one of its earliest examples in this boy sitting waiting on a doorpost.

His zeal had one clear goal. Not to become famous himself, not to acquire authority himself. He wanted to hear every version of every story, and he wanted as many witnesses as possible for the same event. Azami notes, with reference to the Siyar A’lām an-Nubalā, that Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ sometimes asked as many as thirty different Companions ﵃ about one single event, what they had seen or heard. Not out of doubt toward the first ones, but out of the methodical awareness that thirty witnesses together give more than one.

What he did there is something that in our time is called scholarly verifiability. He understood, long before a formal isnād doctrine existed, that the truth of a transmission multiplies with every independent source that confirms it. He was no passive listener. He was, in a word that would only be coined much later in the science of hadith, in practice a verifier.

What he gathered, he wrote down.

This detail is undisputed in the sources, and it is precisely this detail that undercuts the revisionist thesis. Azami cites Sa’d in his Ṭabaqāt and the Taqyīd al-'Ilm of al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, and the picture that rises is consistent. Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ wrote what he heard. And when his eyes grew weaker later in his life, he gave the writing work out of his hands to his slaves, or rather his foster boys whom he had freed as mawālī and who served him as secretaries. “He wrote down what he heard, and sometimes employed his slaves for that purpose,” writes Azami in his summary of the Companion catalogue. At a more advanced age, when his sight failed him entirely, the students came to him and read to him from his own books.

That detail, that he had his own books read to him, is telling for two reasons. First, it means there were books. Real bound or sheet-gathered pieces, not merely oral fragments. Second, it means he knew the contents of those books so precisely that he immediately corrected every misreading. Memory and pen worked upon each other. The one supplemented the other, and the one checked the other.

The Kitāb of 'Alī ﵁

One detail from his younger years deserves separate mention. Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ also possessed a copy of the legal judgments of his cousin 'Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib ﵁. He had copied it himself, and Azami notes on page 41 of the Companion catalogue, with reference to 'Ilal and the Taqyīd al-'Ilm, that he copied it for one of his students. Azami does not name that student. It was no loose leaf, it was a collection that was further followed and copied.

What interests us in this is not the content of 'Alī ﵁'s judgments, that is a subject for another article. What interests us is the formation of a library. A man collects copies. A man copies. A man has another copy again from his copy. That is not an oral cultural pattern. That is a writing culture in full swing, in the first quarter of the first century after the Hijra.

We have seen this before with the scribes of the revelation in the Quran cycle. The pen was present in Mecca, despite the common image of an unlettered city-state. The pen travelled along into the Hijra. And in the generation that came after the Prophet ﷺ, the pen was not merely present, it was active. Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ copied 'Alī ﵁. Others copied Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. The chain of copies was already turning, years before any central caliphal mandate would ever ask anyone to collect the hadith systematically.

Camel-loads

How much did he leave behind?

The classical sources use an expression that has something seductive for a modern reader but that is historically simply accurate: himl ba’īr, a camel-load. Not one sheet of parchment, not one small scroll, not one book. A load. The image of a pack animal sagging under books is in al-Suyūṭī and Ibn Sa’d no mere rhetorical figure, it stands for the volume of what was preserved of his notes after his death.

The man who inherited and kept this load was Kuraib, a freed slave who for years had served as secretary and steward of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. Kuraib was more than a servant. He was student and archivist at once. Azami notes that the books came into his possession at the end of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁'s life, and that Kuraib then entrusted them to Mūsā ibn 'Uqba ﵀, an early Maghāzī compiler whose work was taken up in al-Bukhārī ﵀ and other collections. The later scholars who referred to the notebooks of Kuraib describe the volume in the classical tradition simply as a camel-load. A beast of burden that carried its load, and that load consisted of the notes of the Sea of Knowledge.

That detail is crucial for our discussion. Wansbrough and his successors could reason away the oral transmissions as later fabrications. What they cannot reason away is this material remainder. A load of books. A name of an archivist. A second name, Mūsā ibn 'Uqba ﵀, who passes it on further. A third layer of scholars who quote from it. That is the chain of a living library, not the mist of an oral tradition.

What was in that camel-load cannot be read off from a single inventory, but the nature of the corpus can be reconstructed from the sources. His main work was the tafsir notes. To that was added the copy, transcribed by him, of the legal judgments of 'Alī ﵁. There will have been notes on the Maghāzī, the campaigns of the Prophet ﷺ, for Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ taught that subject on fixed days. And there were, given his correspondence with Companions ﵃ in other regions and his broad legal teaching, collections of sayings of the Prophet ﷺ on a wide range of practical and legal themes. We infer this, we do not read it from a preserved book list.

We know all this indirectly, through the extracts his students later included in their own works, and through the quotations that al-Bukhārī ﵀, Muslim ﵀, and above all aṭ-Ṭabarī ﵀ took over from his material. We shall come to speak of that further on.

The school of Mecca

Mecca was not only the birthplace of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. It was also, and above all, the place where he gave his teaching. When he came of age and the umma moved through history under the Caliphs Uthmān ﵁ and then through the first civil war, he settled, with regular interruptions, in Mecca, where he let a circle of students grow around him that would define the Tābi’ūn generation of the Hijaz.

His method of teaching was structured, and this is exactly where the Wansbroughian assumption stumbles. He used fixed days for fixed subjects. According to a transmission cited in Azami’s catalogue from Khaithamah and the Taqyīd al-'Ilm, he had one day a week for law, another day for the explanation of the Quran, a third day for discussing the Maghāzī, and so on. That is no chance storyteller. That is a timetable.

During the annual pilgrimage his circle expanded enormously. Pilgrims from every region of the Hijaz, from Yemen, from Iraq, from Sham, came to Mecca, and many stayed for days in his circle. He even employed an interpreter for pilgrims who did not command Arabic. The question was asked in a foreign tongue, the interpreter translated, Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ answered, the interpreter gave the answer back.

A teaching structure with fixed days, fixed subjects, an interpreter function, an expansion during the hajj. This is no school invented afterwards in hindsight. This is a school recognised as such in its own time by contemporaries.

At the end of his life he moved to Ṭā’if, where he died in 68 after the Hijra. His year of death is recorded by Azami; the place Ṭā’if and the detail that his grave is visited by pilgrims to this day come from the classical biographical tradition. But his real legacy did not lie in Ṭā’if. It lay in the heads and in the books of five men he had formed in his Meccan circle.

Mujāhid ibn Jabr ﵀: the tafsir compiler

The first we name here is Mujāhid ibn Jabr al-Makkī ﵀, born around 21 after the Hijra and died in 102. He was one of the oldest students of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁, and his life story largely coincides with the flowering of the Meccan school.

Mujāhid ﵀ was of modest origin, a mawla of Banū Makhzūm, and he had nothing but his diligence to gain entry to Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. He later became famous for a sentence he himself is said to have spoken: “I recited the Quran before Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ three times, from beginning to end, and at every verse I stopped and asked him what it relates, in what context it was revealed, and how it is to be understood.” Three complete passes, verse by verse, each time with the master’s commentary. That is no student. That is a dissecting copyist.

The result was a Tafsir that has gone down in history as the Tafsir of Mujāhid. Azami notes in his Tabi’in catalogue, entry number 34, that this commentary was copied by countless scholars. The names of those who transmitted from Mujāhid ﵀ in written form are hard and numerous:

• Abū Yahyā al-Kunāsī ﵀.
• Al-Hakam ibn 'Utaibah ﵀.
• Ibn Abū Najīh ﵀.
• Ibn Juraij ﵀.
• Ibn 'Uyaynah ﵀.
• Laith ibn Abū Sulaim ﵀.
• Mayyāh ibn Sarī ﵀.
• Al-Qāsim ibn Abū Bazzah ﵀.

Eight names, each separately a figure in the history of second-century hadith and tafsir science. Eight independent copies, with different isnāds, all going back to the same Meccan student of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. When al-Bukhārī ﵀ in his Ṣaḥīḥ quotes a saying of Mujāhid ﵀ on a Quranic verse, that is no loose oral transmission, it is a quotation from a text that in his time still circulated in several copies.

What Mujāhid ﵀ taught came from Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. What aṭ-Ṭabarī ﵀ would later compile in his monumental tafsir on the Quran is, for a considerable part, traced back through Mujāhid ﵀ to Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. It is literally his voice, passed on through one intermediary, that resounds in the authoritative Sunni Quran commentary of the third century.

Sa’īd ibn Jubayr ﵀: the martyr

Beside Mujāhid ﵀ stood a man who paid for the Meccan school with his life. Sa’īd ibn Jubayr al-Asadī ﵀, born around 46 after the Hijra, killed in 95. An age of just under fifty.

Sa’īd ﵀ came from Kufa, but he attached himself to Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ in Mecca and to Ibn 'Umar ﵁ in Medina, and he wrote what they passed on to him. Azami notes in entry number 39 of his Tabi’in catalogue, on page 70: “He used to write down ahadith and the knowledge of Ibn 'Abbās, Ibn 'Umar and others, and he compiled a Quran commentary that was transmitted by the following scholars: Abd al-Malik ibn Marwān, ‘Aṭā’ ibn Dīnār, 'Azrah, Al-Dahhāk, Qatādah.”

Five documented transmitters of his Tafsir, each from different regions, each with later students of their own. One of them, al-Daḥḥāk ibn Muzāhim ﵀, taught in Khorāsān and is a key figure in the eastern tafsir tradition. Thus the commentary of Sa’īd ﵀ carried far beyond the Hijaz, generations before the Sunni canon took shape.

What made him indelible in the collective memory of the umma, however, is not only his commentary. It is his death.

Sa’īd ibn Jubayr ﵀ lived in the time of al-Hajjāj ibn Yūsuf, the Umayyad governor of Iraq. A man whose name stands to this day as a synonym for tyranny. When Sa’īd ﵀, after the failed revolt of Ibn al-Ash’ath, ended up on the margin of the political suspects, he was captured and led before al-Hajjāj.

The conversation between the two men has been transmitted by several early sources. We summarise it and render it in dialogue form.

The conversation ran aground on exactly the kind of polemical questions with which al-Hajjāj tried to press the scholars of his time into a corner. Sa’īd ﵀ refused to give a political answer to a theological trick question. He referred only back to what he had heard from his masters, and what they in their turn had taken over from the Prophet ﷺ.

Al-Hajjāj had him executed. One last request was granted him, to pray two units of prayer before the sword would fall. He prayed. And he is said to have spoken, as he turned his face toward the Qibla: “Verily, I turn my face to Him who created the heavens and the earth, as a ḥanīf, and I am not of the polytheists.” It was the verse with which Ibrahim ﵇ had torn himself away from his people in Surah Al-An’ām.

Sa’īd ibn Jubayr ﵀ was beheaded in 95 after the Hijra. Al-Hajjāj reportedly outlived him by barely fifteen days. On his deathbed al-Hajjāj is said to have cried out: “What have I to do with Sa’īd ibn Jubayr? Every time I fall asleep, he takes me by my foot and says: O enemy of Allah, why did you kill me?” The man who had helped deepen the sea of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁'s knowledge had, after his death, more power in the sleep of his executioner than he had had during his life at that man’s court.

What strikes us here, apart from the personal drama, is this: the Meccan school was no noncommittal company. Its students carried their knowledge with a weight for which they were prepared to die. That is not the mark of an oral community invented afterwards in hindsight. That is the mark of a living, tested, and publicly accountable tradition.

'Ikrima ﵀: the shackled student

The third student we name is, in his relation to Ibn 'Abbās ﵁, the most personal. 'Ikrima ﵀, born around 25 after the Hijra and died in 105, was no free Meccan but a Berber slave captured by the troops of the Caliph during a campaign, who ended up with Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ as property.

Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ did not treat 'Ikrima ﵀ as a servant. He treated him as an investment in knowledge. Azami notes in entry number 23 of his Tabi’in catalogue a detail that sounds hard to our ears but must be understood in its historical context: “According to his own statement, Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ used to put shackles on 'Ikrima’s feet to teach him the Holy Quran and the Sunnah.”

Let us pause there a moment. The Berber boy, in a foreign city, in a foreign tongue, had to sit down before his master day after day to memorise the Quran and learn the transmissions of the Prophet ﷺ. Not optionally. Not as a choice. Under physical compulsion. Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ knew something about the boy that the boy himself did not yet know: that in him sat a head that could carry the content. That in him sat a mouth that could pass the content on. And that in him sat a will that without shackles would have given up.

It worked. 'Ikrima ﵀ became not only a scholar, he became the most widely travelled student of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁'s circle. He journeyed through North Africa, through Khorāsān, through Egypt, and everywhere he came he taught what he had learned in Mecca. He commanded the Quran commentary so thoroughly that he stands in the later catalogues as a primary source for the tafsir of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁.

His books were copied by numerous students, and Azami names them by name: 'Amr ibn 'Abd Allāh ﵀, Ayyūb ﵀, Husain ibn Qais ﵀, Jābir ibn Zaid ﵀, 'Uthmān ibn Ghiyāth ﵀, Salamah ibn Wahram ﵀.

There is a remark by Ibn Juraij ﵀, one of the great second-century Meccan scholars, that we take over here literally from Azami because it makes the matter clear. Ibn Juraij ﵀ once reproached a colleague named Yaḥyā ibn Ayyūb for having failed to write from 'Ikrima ﵀. “Whoever does not write from 'Ikrima ﵀,” Ibn Juraij ﵀ is said to have declared, “has lost two-thirds of his knowledge.” Two-thirds of the knowledge of Mecca, concentrated in the leading role of one mawla who had once been clamped in shackles to learn the Quran by heart.

We see something else here as well. We see that the school of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ was no circle of people of standing. A Berber slave, an early Kufan immigrant, a Meccan mawla, an Arab noble, it did not matter. What counted was the capacity to carry the content. The Sea of Knowledge filled every head that offered itself.

‘Aṭā’ ibn Abī Rabāḥ ﵀ and Ṭāwūs ﵀: the Meccan and the Yemenite pillar

Beside these three stand two more names that are mentioned in every classical biography of the Meccan school.

‘Aṭā’ ibn Abī Rabāḥ ﵀ was, like 'Ikrima ﵀, a mawla and black of skin, lame and in later life blind as well. He lost in his life almost everything a human being can physically lose. But what he kept was a head in which the fatwa practice of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ was stored down to the finest detail. The most authoritative of the fuqahā of Mecca in the second half of the first century was ‘Aṭā’ ﵀, and in the years around the second civil war almost every question about rituals, prayer, hajj and legal transactions ended up at his circle. He was designated by Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ himself as the one who would continue the issuing of fatwas in Mecca, and he fulfilled that role for nearly half a century. This ‘Aṭā’ ﵀, the son of Abī Rabāḥ, is not to be confused with the Medinan Tābi’ī ‘Aṭā’ ibn Yasār, an entirely different man from a different city.

What he taught, he did not always write down himself, but his students did. Among them were 'Amr ibn Dīnār ﵀, the Meccan imam, and 'Abd Allāh ibn Abī Najīh ﵀, and finally Ibn Juraij ﵀ whose Muṣannaf is to this day one of the monuments of early hadith literature.

Ṭāwūs ﵀, whose full name is Ṭāwūs ibn Kaysān al-Yamānī ﵀, was no Meccan but a Yemenite. He was a freed mawla of Persian origin who grew up in Ṣan’ā and travelled to Mecca several times to meet Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. He is known for his piety, for his night prayer, and for his tenacity in fatwa.

We also meet Ṭāwūs ﵀ as the man who transmitted the judgments of Mu’ādh ibn Jabal ﵁ in Yemen from a book. We now see him again, this time as the link between the Meccan and the Yemenite school. He joined the two rivers to each other. What Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ taught in Mecca, Ṭāwūs ﵀ carried back to Yemen. What Mu’ādh ﵁ had left behind in Yemen met in Ṭāwūs ﵀ a bearer who could bring it as far as Mecca. The two schools fed each other.

Five students, five independent chains, five regions. Mujāhid ﵀ in Mecca, Sa’īd ibn Jubayr ﵀ via Kufa to Khorāsān, 'Ikrima ﵀ from North Africa to Egypt, ‘Aṭā’ ﵀ in the main mosque of Mecca, Ṭāwūs ﵀ in Yemen. We have no revisionist model that can reason this network away. It existed, it is documented in every catalogue, and it points all five arrows back to one source in Mecca.

The birth of the Tafsir tradition

The Tafsir tradition of the umma, the systematic, verse-by-verse commentary on the Quran, has a father, and that father is he. It was born in the decades in which Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ was in the full bloom of his teaching, in the third quarter of the first century after the Hijra.

What he taught was no homiletic tale and no pious encouragement. It was philology, history, and legal analysis at once. He asked at every verse: when was it revealed, in what situation, against what background, which words in this verse are unusual in Arabic and how did the pre-Islamic poets understand them, what legal ruling follows from it, and how does this verse relate to other verses that speak of the same subject. That is the complete toolkit of tafsir, and it came into being in his mouth, in Mecca.

We do not know this from loose oral fragments. We know this because in later generations a text was transmitted under the title Tafsir Ibn 'Abbās, which in its oldest layers goes back through the link 'Alī ibn Abī Ṭalḥa ﵀. 'Alī ibn Abī Ṭalḥa ﵀ was himself no direct student of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁, he was of the second generation after him. But the Saḥīfa he possessed, carrying a continuous commentary on the Quran from Ibn 'Abbās ﵁'s hand, was used extensively by al-Bukhārī ﵀ in his Ṣaḥīḥ as the main source for the tafsir quotations of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. Al-Suyūṭī ﵀ names this route explicitly in his al-Itqān fī 'Ulūm al-Qur’ān as the most reliable chain of Quran commentary in Ibn 'Abbās ﵁'s name.

To that is added the work of Mujāhid ﵀, the work of Sa’īd ibn Jubayr ﵀, the work of 'Ikrima ﵀, and the collecting work of Ibn Juraij ﵀ and ‘Aṭā’ ﵀. Each of those works contains a considerable part of tafsir from Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. When aṭ-Ṭabarī ﵀ at the beginning of the third century compiles his own monumental Jāmi’ al-Bayān on the Quran, he uses all these streams at once. He did not pluck the quotations from oral fragments. He pressed them together out of written works. And behind each of those works stands a student of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁.

The Quran commentary as the umma knows it today, in hundreds of volumes of classical and modern tafsirs, finds its roots in one Meccan circle from the third quarter of the first century after the Hijra. Not one commentary of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ has survived in his own handwriting. But the voice has been passed on, through five mouths, in five directions, and in every direction fixed in written form. We have never lost that voice in hundreds of independent chains.

What this refutes

Here we see why this article is not only biographical, but polemical in the right sense of the word. It answers an indictment.

Wansbrough claimed in Quranic Studies (1977) and in The Sectarian Milieu (1978) that in the first two centuries after the Hijra there had been no institutionalised transmission of Quran or hadith, that the so-called Meccan, Medinan and Iraqi schools were only constructed in the third century to ascribe an early origin to later doctrines, and that the Quranic text itself received its definitive form only in the second century. Crone and Cook built on those premises in Hagarism (1977) an even more radical scenario, in which early Islam would consist largely of later apologetics.

Against those theses the figure of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ stands as an inescapable given. He was born in 3 before the Hijra, that is a dated fact. He died in 68 after the Hijra, also dated. Between those two dates lies a teaching career with:

• Five students whose names stand in every classical biography and whose death dates are independently confirmed.
• Three students whose own tafsir works existed in written form and are enumerated in catalogues with multiple transmitters.
• Fixed teaching days for different subjects.
• An interpreter function for non-Arab pilgrims.
• A camel-load of his own written material.
• A secretary and archivist, Kuraib, whose transfer to Mūsā ibn 'Uqba ﵀ is recorded in the sources.
• Geographical spread of his teaching from North Africa to Khorāsān, through concrete travelling students.

Those are not loose stories that crept into the collective memory later. Those are the documented traces of a functioning educational institution. Whoever wishes to reason these traces away must not cast suspicion on one source, but reject dozens of independent catalogues at once. The biographical dictionaries of Ibn Sa’d ﵀ in aṭ-Ṭabaqāt, of al-Bukhārī ﵀ in at-Tārīkh al-Kabīr, of Ibn Hibbān ﵀ in ath-Thiqāt, of adh-Dhahabī ﵀ in Siyar A’lām an-Nubalā, of Ibn Hajar ﵀ in al-Iṣāba and Tahdhīb at-Tahdhīb. One by one they record the same names, the same dates, the same student chains. Whoever dismisses this whole complex as later fiction is left with no history in his hands, he keeps only his own scepticism.

The question is the reverse. Not: how can this school really have existed without formal institutes? But: what would it have taken to construct this identical fiction simultaneously throughout the whole umma, without one single early source contradicting it? The answer to that question is practically impossible. And therefore the revisionist thesis stops at Ibn 'Abbās ﵁.

What we see is a man with a mandate from the Prophet ﷺ himself, “Allāhumma faqqih-hu fi’d-dīn wa 'allimhu at-ta’wīl”, who put that mandate into practice for sixty years, and who passed it on through a network of five principal students to a generation that would build the tafsir, fiqh, and hadith science of the second century.

Beyond the writing desk: the personal

Before we close this article, we wish to note something that usually stays out of view in catalogues and in source criticism. Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ was no professorial chair. He was a human being with a life, with personal grief, and with a piety that no one who met him ever forgot.

He was a friend of 'Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib ﵁ and stood at his side during the first fitna. He was present on the day of Siffīn, and he was involved as mediator in the negotiations with the Khārijites. He saw the umma tear apart in the years 35-40 after the Hijra, and in those years he lost men whom he had personally loved. When 'Alī ﵁ was murdered in 40 after the Hijra, Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ was one of his confidants, and afterwards he withdrew largely from political disputes to devote himself to teaching.

In later life he lost his eyesight. He is said to have recited a verse:

If Allah ﷻ has taken my eyes, then my tongue and my heart remain, and both have ears.

He had his students read aloud, he corrected from memory, he taught until his last days. In the year 68 after the Hijra, in Ṭā’if, his soul found rest. His grave has been visited by pilgrims to this day.

What he left behind was not one book. It was a river, and that river feeds to this day every Quran commentary standing in a Sunni library. Whoever opens aṭ-Ṭabarī ﵀ reads Ibn 'Abbās ﵁. Whoever opens Ibn Kathīr ﵀ reads Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ through Ibn Kathīr ﵀ through aṭ-Ṭabarī ﵀ through Mujāhid ﵀ or Sa’īd ﵀ or 'Ikrima ﵀. The river has never run dry.

From fixed teaching day to the open road

But all those private teaching circles, however productive, had one common limitation. They depended on individual masters and on chance students. When a master died, his corpus could be lost if his principal students did not outlive him, or if his books were not secured. When a student died without having formed students of his own, the chain stopped there.

That is exactly what still ended well in the Meccan school of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁, because Mujāhid ﵀ died in 102, Sa’īd ibn Jubayr ﵀ already in 95, 'Ikrima ﵀ in 105, ‘Aṭā’ ﵀ around 115, Ṭāwūs ﵀ in 106. Their students, in their turn, all lived into the second quarter of the second century. The chain did not break. But it could have gone otherwise.

In other regions it sometimes did go otherwise. During the second civil war and in the years of al-Hajjāj, many scholars were killed, imprisoned or driven out. Whole libraries have probably been lost without our ever having catalogues of them. The Meccan school survived because it lay close to the annual hajj stream and because its students were dispersed, but that was luck and geography, no institutional guarantee.

What the school of Ibn 'Abbās ﵁ had already kindled, however, was a habit that countered that danger of loss. The boy who had himself gone from door to door to question the Companions ﵃ had given an example that the next generation would raise into an institution. Whoever wanted knowledge did not wait for it to come to him. He travelled. He journeyed months across desert and mountain pass to hear one transmission from the mouth of the last living witness.

That journey for the sake of knowledge received a name of its own in the second half of the first century, the riḥla, and it anchored the transmission not in one vulnerable city but in a network of travelling bearers who cross-verified each other’s material. The sharpest early example of it is a Companion ﵁ who crossed the desert between Medina and Syria on a camel for a whole month to check one single hadith with a man he had never met.

That journey, that man and that one hadith are the subject of the next article. We leave the fixed teaching days of the Meccan school and step onto the open road, where the preservation of the Sunna no longer depended on who happened to live in the same city, but on who was prepared to travel for it.