I say: For as long as I can remember we have been hearing the students speak of this so-called “grand tafsir” attributed to Ahmad, and their only proof is the anecdote of Ibn al-Munadi. They claim it was a vast work that he heard from his grandfather, from ʿAbbas al-Duri, and from ʿAbd Allah ibn Ahmad. Yet we have never met a single person who could testify to the existence of that tafsir—neither the whole of it, a portion of it, nor even one slim booklet. Had anything of it survived, the seekers of knowledge would certainly have copied it, taken pains with it, obtained it; it would have reached us, become renowned, and the leading scholars of Baghdad would have vied to acquire it. Ibn Jarir, and those who came after him, would have cited it in their own commentaries.

By Allah, it is not reasonable to suppose that Imam Ahmad possessed in the field of tafsir one hundred and twenty thousand hadiths; that would be the size of his Musnad, or double it! Even if Imam Ahmad had compiled something on the Qur’an, it would have been carefully sifted and polished, citing only the well-known reports, and so its bulk would have been small—at most, with great effort, around ten thousand hadiths, if not fewer.

Moreover, Imam Ahmad did not regard authoring books as desirable. The Musnad that bears his name was neither arranged nor edited by him; he merely narrated it to his son in separate notebooks and fascicles, telling him, “Put this in the Musnad of so-and-so, and that in the Musnad of so-and-so.” As for this alleged tafsir, it simply does not exist, and I am convinced it never did.

Baghdad has ever been the seat of the caliphs, the dome of Islam, the abode of hadith, and the stronghold of the sunnah. Ahmad has always been honoured there in every age; he had eminent students, and students of those students, and so on down to yesterday, when the Mongol army (1) overran the city and rivers of blood flowed through its streets. The tafsir that actually became famous in Baghdad was that of Ibn Jarir. Scholars thronged to obtain it, caravans carried it far and wide, and we know of nothing comparable to it in its field; no earlier work exceeded it in size. It fills twenty volumes, and it is unlikely to contain as many as twenty thousand hadiths—more probably about fifteen thousand isnads. Take it and count them yourself, if you wish.