Khuzaymah said to me, “I have been told that you wrote down the Tafsīr from Muḥammad ibn Jarīr?”
I replied, “Indeed, I wrote it from him while he dictated.”
He asked, “All of it?”
I said, “Yes.”
He asked, “In which years?”
I answered, “From the year 283 to 290 AH.”
He continued, “Abū Bakr borrowed the manuscript from me, kept it for some years, then returned it and remarked, ‘I have examined it from beginning to end, and I know of no one walking the face of the earth more learned than Muḥammad ibn Jarīr. The Hanbalis have certainly wronged him.’ ”
Abū Muḥammad al-Farghānī said: Among Muḥammad ibn Jarīr’s completed works is the Book of Tafsīr; were a scholar to claim that he could derive from it ten separate volumes, each treating a single branch of knowledge exhaustively, he would be justified.
He also finished his Book of History up to his own era, as well as the Book of Biographical History of the Companions, the Followers, and the teachers he personally met. Complete, too, is his work Latīf al-Qawl fī Aḥkām Sharāʾiʿ al-Islām—the legal school he selected, refined, and supported with proofs—which runs to eighty-three volumes. Likewise completed are his books: Qirāʾāt wa-l-Tanzīl wa-l-ʿAdad; Ikhtilāf ʿUlamāʾ al-Amṣār; al-Khafīf fī Aḥkām Sharāʾiʿ al-Islām, a concise and elegant abridgment; and al-Tabṣīr, an epistle to the people of Tabaristān in which he explains the principles of faith he followed.
He began composing Tahdhīb al-Āthār—one of the marvels of his oeuvre—opening with the traditions transmitted by al-Ṣiddīq whose chains he had verified. For every hadith he analyzed its defects and transmission routes, its legal implications, the points of scholarly disagreement and their evidences, its meanings and unusual wording, and he refuted the heretics. In it he completed the musnads of the Ten Promised Paradise, the Prophet’s Household, the freedmen, and part of the Musnad of Ibn ʿAbbās, but death overtook him before the work was finished.
I remarked, “Had it been completed, it would have filled one hundred volumes.”
He went on: “He also started his book al-Basīṭ, and from it the section on Purification alone came to roughly 1,500 folios, because in every chapter he recorded the differing opinions of the Companions….”