Muqatil ibn sulayman

Who was Muqatil ibn sulayman?

Muqatil ibn Sulayman al-Balkhi was an 8th-century Sunni mufassir of the Quran.

Ibn Sa'd's complete biography of Muqatil is "The one who had a tafsir, He related from al-Dahhak ibn Muzahim and Ata ibn Abi Rabah, students of Ibn Abbas. Some of the people of hadith were wary of his hadith and objected to them," Ibn Sa'd describes him as one of the Fuqaha' and Hadith scholars in Khurasan and does not give him a date of death.

Imam al-Shafi'i declared that "People are all the children of Abu Hanifa in fiqh, of Ibn Ishaq in history, of Imam Malik in hadith, and of Muqatil in tafsîr".

Muqatil is the alleged author of a tafsir on the Quran that John Wansbrough considers the oldest surviving complete tafsir and discusses in some detail. This work was still in manuscript when Wansbrough wrote but has since been published.

He also played some part in the civil war during the caliphate of Marwan ibn Muhammad.

His views on divine anthropomorphism were notorious to later generations, but in spite of his “extreme” corporealism, he employed ta'wil in his tafsir even on verses on the attributes of Allah believed by many to show the contradiction in his thought.