—so too it may bear clues that expose it as a lie, clues so unmistakable that one is as certain of its falsity as he is of the fabrications coined by the innovators who exaggerate virtue. A case in point is the ḥadith concerning the day of ʿĀshūrāʾ, or other reports that promise, for example, that whoever prays two rakʿahs will receive the reward of such-and-such a number of prophets. Tafsīr works contain a sizeable trove of this spurious material, among it the narration transmitted by al-Thaʿlabī, al-Wāḥidī, and al-Zamakhsharī on the merits of every single surah of the Qurʾān—an outright fabrication by the unanimous verdict of the scholars.

As for al-Thaʿlabī himself, he possessed a measure of piety and goodness, yet he was like a night-time wood-gatherer: whatever he found in the books of tafsīr—sound, weak, or fabricated—he collected without discrimination.

Commentary
A wood-gatherer by night cannot distinguish fresh wood from dry, or a stick from a snake; he simply picks up whatever lies before him.

Al-Wāḥidī, his companion, may have had a sharper grasp of Arabic, but he strayed even further from safety and from following the early generations. Al-Baghawī’s Tafsīr is an abridgement of al-Thaʿlabī’s, yet he safeguarded it from fabricated ḥadiths and heterodox opinions. Still, fabricated material remains plentiful in the books of tafsīr.

Commentary
This is Shaykh al-Islām’s assessment—may Allah have mercy on him—of these commentaries: he speaks about al-Thaʿlabī, al-Wāḥidī, and al-Baghawī. His words indicate that al-Baghawī’s Tafsīr is the superior work among them.

If someone were to ask, “Does merely citing the isnād before a fabricated ḥadith justify inserting it into a tafsīr?” I would reply that, although providing the chain might absolve the author’s conscience, it