The point, then, is that such people first embrace a given opinion and only afterwards impose the Qur’an’s wording upon it. In doing so they have no precedent among the Companions, the Followers who excelled in righteousness, or the leading imams of the Muslim community—neither in the doctrine itself nor in their manner of interpreting the text.

There is not a single one of their spurious commentaries whose falsehood cannot be exposed from many angles, and this on two counts: at times by demonstrating that their very claim is corrupt, and at other times by showing that the interpretation they attach to the Qur’an—whether adduced as proof for their view or as a reply to their opponents—is itself unsound.

Some of them are gifted with graceful expression and eloquence, and they smuggle innovations into their writings—while most people remain unaware—such as the author of al-Kashshāf and others of his ilk. As a result, large numbers of readers who would never consciously espouse falsehood accept, by Allah’s will, any number of their flawed interpretations. I have personally seen exegetes and other scholars cite in their own works passages from those commentaries that accord with principles they themselves know—or at least believe—to be invalid, yet they do not realize what they are transmitting.

Explanation

The reason is that those writers are powerful stylists: outwardly their words appear fine and unobjectionable, but within them they hide poison. Those who quote from their tafsirs while being aware of the authors’ unsound beliefs have been taken in by the elegance of their style and diction and have failed to notice the falsehood therein. We have already explained that the basic cause is that they first adopt a view and then look for evidence to support it, or they cite texts from the Book and the Sunnah for meanings those texts were never intended to convey.