prophets. Within the corpus of Qur’anic commentary there is a sizable share of such fabrications. One example is the hadith circulated by al-Thaʿlabī, al-Wāḥidī, and al-Zamakhsharī on the virtues of the surahs of the Quran, listing them one by one; the scholars unanimously agree that it is forged.

As for al-Thaʿlabī, he was personally a man of piety and goodwill, yet he was like a night wood-gatherer: he reproduced whatever he found in earlier commentaries—sound, weak, or fabricated alike. His colleague al-Wāḥidī had a stronger command of Arabic than he, but was further removed from soundness and from the way of the early generations. Al-Baghawī’s Tafsīr is an abridgement of al-Thaʿlabī’s, yet he protected it from spurious hadiths and heterodox opinions.

Indeed, fabricated material is plentiful in the books of tafsīr: numerous reports that explicitly prescribe reciting the basmala (the opening formula “In the Name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Compassionate”) aloud; the lengthy narration about ʿAlī giving charity with his ring while in prayer—which is forged by consensus of the scholars; and the claims that the verse “For every people there is a guide” (13:7) refers to ʿAlī, or that the verse “so that an attentive ear may take it in” (69:12) means “your ear, O ʿAlī.”