(1) The author who calls herself “Raghda,” in her book on the hijab, has brazenly denied the authenticity of the report attributed to Ibn Abbas, displaying gross ignorance. After quoting the report (pp. 35–36) she writes: “But Ibn Abbas, in the tafsir they consider authoritative (…), says something else, and I will reproduce it verbatim.” She then cites from al-Muqbas (p. 294), under Surah al-Nur, that Ibn Abbas interpreted the phrase illa ma zahara minha (“except what ordinarily appears”) as “a woman’s clothing.” I reply: We used to complain about certain men falsifying evidence—as mentioned earlier—only to find ourselves confronted with falsification by what is nowadays called “the fair sex.” Her statement that this tafsir is “authoritative” exists only in her own imagination, the very notion that led her to compete with men in authoring works on this subject. Because she noticed that this “Tafsir of Ibn Abbas” has been printed several times, she assumed it must enjoy scholarly acceptance. By that logic, al-Sha‘rani’s al-Tabaqat al-Kubra would also be authoritative—despite its blatant heresies and acts of shirk, such as one saint’s claim: “For twenty years I refrained from saying to a thing ‘Be!’ and it would be, out of courtesy toward Allah”—simply because it, too, has been printed perhaps more than ten times. It seems to me—Allah knows best—that this unfortunate woman either never read the beginning of this “authoritative tafsir,” which states that it is transmitted through Muhammad b. Marwan, from al-Kalbi, from Abu Salih, from Ibn Abbas; or she read it but failed to understand; or she understood it only with a layperson’s mindset: that any report with a chain must be authentic. Had she possessed even modest learning enabling her to write, verify, and critique, she would have known that Muhammad b. Marwan—al-Suddi al-Saghir—is a liar, as is his teacher al-Kalbi (Muhammad b. al-Saib. I listed several of their fabricated hadiths in al-Silsila al-Dai‘fa, nos. 111, 203, 608, 730, 859, 1111, 1318, and 1567). Because of al-Kalbi’s dismal standing, when Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyya declared the Tafsir of Imam al-Tabari the soundest of all commentaries, he explained in al-Fatawa (13/385) that one reason is al-Tabari’s refusal to transmit from unreliable figures such as Muqatil b. Bishr and al-Kalbi. See also Kashf al-Zunun (1/429) and al-Tarattib al-Idariyya (2/255).