know nothing about it beyond conjecture about the unseen.

The best way to present a disagreement, then, is to include all the views on the matter, identify the correct ones, refute the false ones, and explain the disagreement’s significance and implications. This prevents fruitless disputes from becoming prolonged and distracting people from more important matters.

Anyone who recounts a disagreement without including all the views held on the matter gives an incomplete account, since the correct view may be among those omitted. Likewise, an account that merely presents the disagreement without identifying the correct view is incomplete. Whoever knowingly endorses an incorrect view has deliberately lied; whoever does so out of ignorance has erred. Similarly, anyone who raises a dispute over something of no benefit, or recounts numerous views whose wording differs but whose substance amounts to only one or two positions, has wasted time and made a false show of abundance. He is like someone wearing two garments of falsehood. Allah alone grants success in reaching what is right.

Section

If you do not find the explanation in the Quran or the Sunnah, nor in reports from the Companions, many of the leading scholars have turned in such cases to the statements of the Successors, “such as Mujāhid ibn Jabr.” He was outstanding in Quranic interpretation, as Muhammad ibn Ishāq said: “We were told by