—at dawn (3:17)—that “the steadfast ones” refers to the Messenger of Allah, “the truthful ones” to Abū Bakr, “the devout ones” to ʿUmar, “the charitable ones” to ʿUthmān, and “those who seek forgiveness” to ʿAlī. Likewise, regarding the verse, “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah and those who are with him” (they say this means) Abū Bakr; “stern against the disbelievers” ʿUmar; “merciful among themselves” ʿUthmān; “you see them bowing and prostrating” (48:29) ʿAlī.

Even more astonishing is the claim of some of them that “By the fig” stands for Abū Bakr, “and the olive” for ʿUmar, “and Mount Sinai” for ʿUthmān, and “this secure city” (95:1-3) for ʿAlī—and similar fantasies that sometimes interpret a word in a way it can never possibly bear, for these expressions do not in any way denote those particular persons. As for His words, “and those who are with him are stern against the disbelievers, merciful among themselves; you see them bowing and prostrating,” every clause is a predicate describing the same group—what the grammarians call one predicate after another. The point here is that they are all attributes of a single referent, namely those who are with him; it is impermissible to assign each phrase to a different individual.

At other times they restrict a general, unrestricted wording to a single person, as when they claim that the verse, “Your guardian is only Allah, His Messenger, and the believers” (5:55) was meant solely for ʿAlī; or when some of them maintain that “The one who brought the truth and testified to it” (39:33) refers exclusively to Abū Bakr; or that “Those of you who spent and fought before the conquest are not equal” (57:10) refers exclusively to Abū Bakr, and the like.

The tafsīr of Ibn ʿAṭiyyah and similar works is closer to the Sunnah and the mainstream community and safer from innovation than al-Zamakhsharī’s commentary. Had Ibn ʿAṭiyyah cited in their proper form the statements of the early generations that appear in the transmitted exegeses, his work would have been better and more elegant. He often quotes from the commentary of Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī—one of the most eminent and weighty of all tafsīrs—yet he bypasses what Ibn Jarīr reports from the early authorities and does not reproduce it at all, while presenting what he claims to be the view of “the investigators,” by whom he means a group of speculative theologians who established their principles by methods of the same kind that the Muʿtazilites used, even though