…according to his law—up until the coming of Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. They went on to say that this, they claimed, was the view of al-Suddi as transmitted from his teachers.

The third opinion is that they were seekers of the true religion—people like Ḥabīb al-Najjār, Qis ibn Saʿidah, Salman al-Fārisi, Abū Dharr, and Baḥīra the monk. These men believed in the Prophet before his mission: some lived long enough to meet him and follow him, while others did not.

The fifth opinion is that they were the hypocrites. The sixth is that they were those who had believed in the past prophets and earlier scriptures, yet refused to believe in you or in your Book.

Al-Thaʿlabī and the like have recorded these views without identifying their sources. Abū’l-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī also mentioned them—except for the sixth—naming the proponents of the earlier opinions, and relating that the view that they were hypocrites is attributed to al-Thawrī. All of these opinions, however, are innovations; none of the Companions, nor the generation that followed them in excellence, held any of them. The attribution to al-Suddi is erroneous, for we have already cited his exact wording as found in his commentary, transmitted with an authentic chain of narration in those tafsirs that preserve isnads, such as the exegesis of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī Ḥātim, Abū Bakr ibn al-Mundhir, Muhammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, and similar works…