Ibn Abbas

The method credited to Ibn Abbas is philological before it is theological. Asked about a rare or difficult word, he is reported to have answered by citing a line of pre-Islamic Arabic verse in which the same word appears, on the principle that poetry is the register of the Arabs and preserves the vocabulary the revelation was delivered in. A celebrated set of two hundred questions on obscure words, put to him by a Kharijite questioner and answered from poetry in each case, circulates under his name as an illustration of the method whatever its own transmission history.

Two other strands are associated with him. One is the occasions of revelation, the reports of the circumstance in which a passage was given, which anchor a verse to a moment and constrain how widely it can be read. The other is the identification of what a pronoun or an allusion refers to, which is the bulk of early commentary.

The discipline that grew out of this had to spend centuries sorting his name from the material attached to it. Later critics of tafsir graded the chains of transmission from him explicitly, treating one written collection transmitted through Ali ibn Abi Talha as the soundest available and rejecting another route outright as a chain of falsehood. A large commentary circulating under his name is generally judged by scholars not to be his work.

That sorting problem is itself the point of interest. The most cited authority in Quranic exegesis is also the authority in whose name the largest quantity of doubtful material was produced, and the two facts are connected.

Ibn Abbas was a boy when the Prophet died, which means his whole adult life falls inside the conflicts that followed. He held Basra as governor for his cousin Ali, and the sources also carry a dispute about the treasury there and about his leaving the post, told in ways that clearly reflect later partisanship.

The episode most often credited to him is the negotiation at Harura. When a body of Ali's army broke away over the decision to accept arbitration, becoming the first Kharijites, Ibn Abbas was sent to argue with them. The reports have him address their three specific objections point by point rather than denouncing them, and return with a large number persuaded. Whether the numbers are reliable or not, the episode is remembered as an argument won by engaging with the case rather than by force, which is rare in that decade.

Later he declined to give allegiance to Ibn al-Zubayr during the second civil war and was expelled from Mecca to Ta'if, where he died around 687. He was blind in his last years.

One further fact shapes everything written about him. The Abbasid caliphate, which held power from 750, took its name and its legitimacy from descent through him. A dynasty with an interest in the standing of its ancestor patronised scholarship for five centuries, and the effect on the volume of material transmitted in his name is impossible to separate out. The honorific titles, the interpreter of the Quran and the rabbi of this community, are genuine early usage, and they were also extremely convenient.