The Problem of the Quranic al-ṣamad - Part 3
On the meaning of Sura 112 and the Quranic conception of God
The Islamic tradition and its treatment of sura 112
Lack of familiarity with ṣamad appears to underpin the Islamic literary tradition’s discussion of sura 112. The bulk of the early explanations are to be found in the tafsīr and sīra genres of literature. The earliest exegetes were Muqātil ibn Sulaymān (d. 767), a Khurasani who moved to Iraq after the Abbasid revolution, and the Kufan narrator Muḥammad al-Kalbī, d. 763), though neither of them came to be regarded as authoritative in the evolving tafsīr genre.[1] Recensions of al-Kalbī are presented as exclusive transmissions from ʿAbd Allāh Ibn ʿAbbās (d. 687), one of the top five transmitters from among the companions in terms of volume of hadith.[2] Ibn ʿAbbās is unique in that his chains of transmission cover the entire text, unlike major transmitters of the following generations such as Mujāhid ibn Jabr (d. 722) and Sufyān al-Thawrī (d. 778).[3]
Muqātil’s Tafsīr mentions ṣamad twice, in his commentary on sura 112 and in his explanation of Q 5:14, one of the earliest examples of Muslim polemic against Christian sects (presented as a narrative without the sourcing of hadith).[4] The latter verse reads: “We took a pledge from those who say, ‘We are Christians (naṣārā)’, but they forgot some of what they were told to remember, so we stirred enmity and hatred among them until the day of resurrection, when God will remind them of what they used to do.” In Muqātil’s view, this means that because they have chosen not to follow Muḥammad, God has created the confessional conflict among Christians over how to understand the triune nature of God, as reflected in their division into Nestorians (nusṭūriyya), by which he means the Diaphysite Church of the East, Miaphysite Jacobites (maryaʿqūbiyya),[5] and the Melkite Chalcedonian orthodoxy (ʿibādat al-mulk).[6] He explains this division further as that Nestorians say Jesus is the son of God (ʿĪsā ibn Allāh), the Jacobites say God is the Messiah, son of Mary, and the Melkites say that God is the third of three (thālith thalātha), meaning “He is a god, Jesus is a god, and Mary is a god.”[7] Muqātil goes on: “But Allāh is one god, Jesus is the servant of Allāh and his Prophet, as Allāh described himself: aḥad, ṣamad, lam yalid, wa-lam yūlad, wa-lam yakun lahu kufuwan aḥadan.”[8] In other words, Muqātil is explicit that sura 112 is addressed to sectarian conflict among Christians over the nature of God.[9]
Muqātil offers two stories to explain the circumstances of sura 112, one that takes place in Medina and a second in Mecca. In the first he describes the first two verses, that God is aḥad and al-ṣamad, as meaning that God is a single entity with no equal (aḥad lā sharīka lahu). He cites the earliest version of a story, later related in different form in Ibn Kathīr’s al-Bidāya wa-l-nihāya, of the tribal chief ʿĀmir ibn al-Ṭufayl’s meeting with Muḥammad in which ʿĀmir offers to follow him if given control of Bedouin communities in return. ʿĀmir proceeds to ask Muḥammad in a threatening manner about the nature of his lord (rabb). In response to a question about God’s companion (khalīl), God sends down the words “Say [O Muḥammad][10] he is Allāh, aḥad,” and in response to questions about God’s name, his size (or order, kam), and his food, God reveals Allāh al-ṣamad, to which Muqātil adds the gloss, “he who does not eat or drink”—a statement that holds to the quranic standard for divinity vis-à-vis mortality cited of Jesus and Mary in Q 5:75: kānā yaʾkulān al-ṭaʾām (they both used to eat food). Following this incident, both ʿĀmir and his companion Arbad ibn Qays are overtaken by calamities that result in their death.
In the second story, among the polytheists (mushrikūn) of Mecca asking Muḥammad to describe his lord is, again, ʿĀmir ibn al-Ṭufayl, who says, “Tell us about your lord. Is he of gold, silver, iron, or brass?” as well as Jews, who ask Muḥammad to describe ʿUzayr, “the son of God (ibn Allāh) who God described in the Torah.”[11] Muqātil this time gives two explanations of al-ṣamad: “that which does not have an inside like the inside of created beings [i.e., who is not hollow like created beings]” (alladhī lā jawfa lahu ka-jawf al-makhlūqīn) and “the lord to whom created beings obediently affirm they have recourse for their needs” (al-sayyid alladhī taṣmud ilayhi al-khalāʾiq bi-ḥawāʾijihim wa-bi-l-iqrār wa-l-khuḍūʿ).[12] Lam yalid and lam yūlad are given as rebuttals of pagan Arab claims that the angels are daughters of God, Jewish claims regarding ʿUzayr, and Christian claims regarding Jesus and Mary. Thus, in the earliest Muslim explanation of Q 112:2, the author has cited the unique typological nature of the divinity and the contingent nature of created beings who have need of him.
As regards al-Kalbī, the other early exegete, his tafsīr exists through a number of later recensions, notably those of a Khurasani Karrami scholar called ʿAbd Allāh ibn Mubārak al-Dīnawarī (early 900s) and the lexicographer Fīrūzābādī (d. 1414),[13] which means that it is liable to include later understandings of the text and its terminology.[14] Declaring that “Ibn ʿAbbās said,” al-Dīnawarī establishes the context for the sura as that of the Quraysh asking Muḥammad to explain whether his lord is made of gold or silver. Al-Dīnawarī then relates a series of short explanations of each verse in a matter-of-fact style, including six for 112:2, which take up most of the discussion. These are: the lord (sayyid) who has complete dominion (suʾdad) and was needed by created beings;[15] that which neither eats nor drinks and is not hollow (laysa bi-ajwaf); the creator without imperfection (al-ṣāniʿ bi-lā ʿayb); the sufficient (al-kāfī); that which has no entrance or exit (laysa lahu madkhal wa-lā makhraj); and that which did not beget, was not begotten, and has no equal (Q 112:3-4). Fīrūzābādī’s version gives al-ṣāniʿ bi-lā ʿayb as al-ṣafī bi-lā ʿayb and follows this directly with, “And it is said al-ṣamad al-dāʾim, and it is said al-ṣamad al-bāqī,” which appears to be an editorialization reflecting the later consensus over al-ṣamad as expressing the eternal nature of God.[16]
Evolution of meaning and interpretation can be seen as well in other early work, such as the roughly contemporaneous Sīra of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 767), a Medinan whose life was mostly lived under Umayyad rule but who compiled his work under Abbasid patronage. In the recension of Ibn Hishām (d. 834), Ibn Isḥāq cites two similar stories in which the text of sura 112 is given—an asbāb al-nuzūl report on the authority of Kufan jurist Saʿīd ibn Jubayr (d. ca. 714) with no chain of authorities (isnād), and a hadith from the companion Abū Hurayra (d. 678), who says he himself heard the statements in question uttered. In the first, Gabriel brings Muḥammad the revelation when the Prophet is angered by Jews of Mecca asking him, “If God created the creation, who created God?” and again, a second time, when they press him, “How is his [God’s] creation? How is his forearm? How is his upper arm?” In the second story, Muḥammad adds his recommendation to respond to questions over God’s creation by reciting the sura. But Ibn Hishām adds in explanation that al-ṣamad means the one to whom one should yaṣmad, or yafzaʿ (seek refuge), adding an often cited line of poetry in which Hind, a poetess of Banī Asad, laments the death of a kinsman at the court of the last Lakhmid ruler of al-Hira as al-sayyid al-ṣamad.[17] Elsewhere, Ibn Hishām cites a report from Ibn Isḥāq in which the companion Ḥassān ibn Thābit (d. 674) recites poetry calling on Quraysh to renounce pagan gods and embrace al-wāḥid al-ṣamad.[18] Thus, whereas Ibn Isḥāq provides a story that illustrates the sura’s meaning as that of God as a unique category apart from his creation, Ibn Hishām reflects the literary and cultural concerns of the Abbasid era in elaborating on the Arabian origins of an obscure term. The creation story appears again in the rapidly expanding hadith genre a century later, specifically in the Musnad of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855) in which it is Abū Hurayra who responds to a man in Iraq asking him, “Who created God” (man khalaqa Allāh), by repeating the formula of sura 112 in the form of an invocation beginning ṣadaqa Allāh.[19]
Jāmiʿ al-bayān of al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) is the earliest tafsīr to survive fully extant and it functions in turn as the touchstone for most later material. Following the conventions of the now well-established hadith tradition, al-Ṭabarī established six theories of al-ṣamad’s meaning, which can be summarized as:[20] a solid, nonhollow entity that does not eat or drink (alladhī laysa bi-ajwaf wa-lā yaʾkul wa-lā yashrab), with sixteen hadith; the entity from which nothing issues (alladhī lā yakhruj minhu shayʾ), with two hadith; the one who did not beget and was not begotten (alladhī lam yalid wa-lam yūlad), with three hadith; an entity of ultimate lordship (or sovereignty, al-sayyid alladhī intahā suʾdaduhu), with four hadith; the one who endures (al-bāqī alladhī lā yafnā), with two hadith; and the lord of ultimate recourse (al-sayyid alladhī yuṣmad ilayhi, alladhī lā aḥad fawqahu), with two citations from early Arabic poetry. The first group contains chains of transmission whose authorities include several Companions and second- and third-generation transmitters, including Ibn ʿAbbās and Mujāhid (five times); al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 728) and ʿĀmir al-Shaʿbī (d. ca. 721) twice; and al-Ḍaḥḥāk ibn Sufyān, ʿĀmir ibn Wāthila (d. 718), Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib (d. 712f.), ʿAbd Allāh ibn Burayda (d. 733), al-Rabīʿ ibn Muslim (d. 783), ʿIkrima ibn ʿAbd Allāh (d. 723), and al-Ḥusayn ibn al-Faraj, once each.[21] Consonant with al-Shāfiʿī’s convention of the overriding authority of statements going back to Muḥammad, it is Ibn Burayda’s report that his father (Companion Burayda ibn al-Ḥuṣayb, d. 682f.) claimed to have obtained the information from the Prophet, who said al-ṣamad alladhī lā jawfa lahu, that leads al-Ṭabarī to opt for this group as reflecting the most likely meaning (awlā bi-taʾwīl al-kalima). In other words, it is the notion of God as the unique entity upon which all creation depends given by Muqātil that predominates in the material provided by al-Ṭabarī, despite the alternative theories beginning to appear regarding God’s eternality.
With hadith now center stage in the methodogical presentation of evidence, works of tafsīr after al-Ṭabarī tend to bundle together various statements in Muqātil and al-Ṭabarī,[22] elaborate on the notion of al-ṣamad as expressing the names and attributes of God as articulated in the kalām literature,[23] and attest to the divine favor attached to reciting sura 112.[24] But God’s substantive nature remained central, even in writings outside the major works of the genre. Sura 112 is one of six short commentaries authored by Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) and was the subject of a commentary by Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī (d. 1502f.) among others.[25] The commentary frames God in terms of wājib al-wujūd, the argument of God’s necessity expounded elsewhere by Ibn Sīnā.[26] His comment on Allāh al-ṣamad is brief. Ṣamad has two linguistic interpretations that complement each other, he says: a negative definition, alladhī lā jawfa lahu, and a positive one, al-sayyid. The first shows that he is an independent entity (al-ḥaqq al-wājib al-wujūd muṭlaqan min jamīʿ al-wujūh), while the second adds the sense that he is “the principle for all” (mabdaʾ li-l-kull), thus completing divinity (ilāhiyya).[27] He posseses a huwiyya (identity) whose mahiyya (essence) is retained completely in itself, not shared with an entity issuing from him (yatawallad ʿanhu).[28] In other words, there is no “godness” because God is unique: huwiyya and mahiyya are one. Divinity is established through ṣamadiyya, “which means wājib al-wujūd” and that “he is in no way a composite” (ghayr murakkab aṣlan).[29] Thus, Ibn Sīnā appears to have extracted from the disparate hadith material in the tafsīr and sīra literature the key points on the material nature of the divinity and its import for creation, and then merged them into a coherent theological whole using the language of Aristotelian logic and metaphysics.[30]
Elsewhere, this interpretation of ṣamad appears alongside eternality, the consensus meaning of the classical literature, in the Sufi exegesis titled Ḥaqāʾiq al-tafsīr, compiled by Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 1021), a Sufi Shafiʿi from Khurasan.[31] This book comprises hadith material said to have been narrated by the sixth Shiʿi imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765)[32] and material from Ibn Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj (d. 922), the well-known Sunni mystic of Baghdad.[33] Al-Ḥallāj does not discuss Q 112:2 directly, but talks of 112:1’s aḥad in terms of the necessary existent,[34] and in his commentary on Q 23:91’s mā ittakhadha llāh min walad he writes that al-ṣamadiyya is “impervious to that which is inappropriate because al-ṣamadiyya is forever incompatible with its opposites.”[35] And later writers such as the Damascene Hanbali Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) were also careful to uphold ṣamad’s meanings located in ontology, despite the popularity of the notion of eternality. God alone, Ibn Taymiyya wrote, has the quality of ṣamadiyya, because unlike created things he is indivisible (aḥad) and not liable to deconstruction (ṣamad), and it is in this manner that al-ṣamad equates to other names of God such as al-dāʾim and al-bāqī.[36]
[1] I. Goldfeld, “The Tafsīr of ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAbbās,” Der Islam 58 (1981): 125–35, at 128–29. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 134–7. On the genre following established approaches to scriptural interpretation in Jewish and Christian circles (Alexandria, Antioch, Palestine, and Iraq) see Y. Goldfeld, “The Development of Theory on Qur’ānic Exegesis in Islamic Scholarship,” Studia Islamica 67 (1988): 5–27.
[2] Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 133–34; A. Tohe, Muqātil ibn Sulaymān: A Neglected Figure in the Early History of Qur’ānic Commentary (PhD diss., Boston University, 2015).
[3] Per Yeshayahu Goldfeld (“Tafsīr,” 126–27), the various lines of transmission from Ibn ʿAbbās reflect the reception of the material by his various students.
[4] Tohe, Muqātil ibn Sulaymān, 148–50.
[5] Muqātil refers in his commentary on 5:17–18 to the Jacobites as followers of al-Sayyid and al-ʿĀqib in Najran, whom he says are the specific Christians referred to as believing that Allāh is al-Masīḥ ibn Maryam. Najran Christians are cited again in his commentary on 5:72. In Ibn Hishām’s recension of Ibn Isḥāq, al-Sayyid is described as the term for the Najran administrative leader and al-ʿĀqib (a Himyarite term) is the title of their political leader; they meet the Prophet with their bishop Abū Ḥāritha in the story of the delegation of Najran Christians.
[6] Muqātil ibn Sulayman, Tafsīr, ed. A. Farīd, 3 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003), 1: 288 (Q 5:14). Elsewhere he refers to the Melkites as mulkānī.
[7] Ibid. Muqātil’s characterization of the differences among the three churches is imprecise and arguably confused. On the quranic accusation that some Christians considered Mary as divine and part of the Trinity, see Crone, “Jewish Christianity.” Sidney Griffith thinks that “third of three” references a Syriac epithet of Christ; S. H. Griffith, “Syriacisms in the ‘Arabic Qurʾān’: Who Were ‘Those Who Said “Allāh Is Third of Three”’ according to al-Māʾida 73,” in A Word Fitly Spoken: Studies in Mediaeval Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and the Qurʾān Presented to Haggai Ben Shammai, ed. M. M. Bar-Asher et al. (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2007), 83–110, esp. 100–108.
[8] Muqātil, Tafsīr, 1: 288. Muqātil (Tafsīr, 3: 522) has the Prophet’s grandfather ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib describe the Kaʿba as al-bayt al-ḥarām al-maṣmūd in his commentary on Q 105.
[9] Al-Ṭabarī rejects this in favor of it meaning Jews and Christians generically; al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān, 24 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1954–1969), 10: 139–40.
[10] The gloss is Muqātil’s: Tafsīr, 3: 534.
[11] Ibid., 3: 535. ʿUzayr is a figure mentioned in Q 9:30 as revered by Jews as a son of God. The name has been widely understood as a diminutive of Ezra and referring to the biblical character of that name. See H. Lazarus Yafeh, “ʿUzayr,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed, accessed online March 27, 2022.
[12] Muqātil, Tafsīr, 3: 535. Jawf appears once in the Quran at 33:4, meaning the inside of a body.
[13] John Wansbrough (Quranic Studies, 146) first argued that al-Dīnawarī’s al-Wādiḥ (Tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās) was a reproduction of al-Kalbī. Andrew Rippin then showed that fourteen manuscripts from the seventh to fifteenth centuries, including Tafsīr al-Kalbī, Tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Wādiḥ, and Fīrūzābādī’s Tanwīr al-miqbās fī tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās are almost identical; A. Rippin, “Tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās and Criteria for Dating Early tafsīr Texts,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 18 (1994): 38–83. Harald Motzki and Nosrat Nilsaz later argued that al-Dīnawarī’s al-Wāḍiḥ is a summary of al-Kalbī: H. Motzki, “Dating the So-called Tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās: Some Additional Remarks,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 31 (2006):147–63; and N. Nilsaz, “The al-Wādiḥ Tafsīr: Further Evidence for Author Identification, Relationship with Tafsīr al-Kalbī, and Literary Analysis,” Der Islam 95.2 (2018): 401–28. Nilsaz also showed that al-Dīnawarī’s al-Wāḍiḥ was mistakenly attributed to Ibn Wahb (d. 920) by Aḥmad Farīd in his 2003 edition. Al-Dīnawarī’s dates are not clear.
[14] The style is more direct and concise than Muqātil; Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 133; and A. Rippin, “Studying Early tafsīr Texts,” Der Islam 72 (1995): 310–23, at 322–23.
[15] The editor has read this word from manuscript as khilāf, but it would appear to be the khalāʾiq of reports in other tafsīr literature. Al-Dīnawarī, Tafsīr Ibn Wahb al-musammā al-Wāḍiḥ, ed. A. Farid, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2002), 2: 526.
[16] Fīrūzābādī, Tanwīr al-miqbās fī tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2018), 522.
[17] Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, 2 vols. (Jeddah: Muʾassasat ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān, n.d.), 1: 572. The line of poetry is given by al-Ṭabarī in his section on sura 112, but without mention of Hind.
[18] Ibid., 2: 305. In al-Wāqidī’s recension, ṣamad only appears in the name of two Islamic-era narrators of hadith: ʿAbd al-Ṣamad ibn Muḥammad al-Saʿdī and ʿAbd al-Ṣamad ibn ʿAli; al-Wāqidī, Kitāb al-maghāzī, ed. M. Jones, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 1: 183, 300, 441, 2: 885, 914 922.
[19] Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad al-Imām Aḥmad, 9 vols. (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1993), 2: 387, no. 27480.
[20] Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān, 24 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1954–69), 24: 689–94.
[21] Mujāhid and al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī are said to have participated in Ibn ʿAbbās’s study circle.
[22] For example, Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī’s report on al-ṣamad in al-Ṭabarsī (d. 1153)’s Tafsīr majmaʿ al-bayān, 10 vols. (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī, 1995), 10: 487.
[23] For example, the second hadith sourced to Ibn ʿAbbas regarding lordship in al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, 24: 692.
[24] For example, the mass of material on the importance of recitation given by Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373) in Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, 8 vols. (Riyadh: Dār Ṭība, 2002), 8: 518–29.
[25] ʿAbd Allāh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Khaṭīb, “Tafsīr sūrat al-ikhlāṣ,” Majallat al-sharīʿa wa-l-dirāsat al-islāmiyya 17.51 (University of Kuwait, December 2002), 8.
[26] He begins the treatise with an explication of huwa in qul huwa Allāh aḥad as alladhī yakūn huwiyyatu l-dhātihi huwa wājib al-wujūd; al-Khaṭīb, “Tafsīr,” 31. Ibn Sīnā’s text is reproduced on pp. 31–40.
[27] Ibid., 36.
[28] Ibid., 37.
[29] Ibid., 39.
[30] Among the vast literature, a good overview is D. Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
[31] M. Musharraf, “A Study on the Sufi Interpretation of Qurʾān and the Theory of Hermeneutic,” Al-Bayān: Journal of Qurʾān and Ḥadīth Studies 11.1 (2013): 33–47, at 40, 44.
[32] Al-Bukhārī rejected them, the Malikis accepted them, and Ibn Ḥanbal accepted some; see L. Massignon, Essai sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1922), 180.
[33] Massignon, Essai, 181–2. Louis Massignon suggests that al-Ḥallāj used some of Jaʿfar’s material. See G. Böwering, “The Major Sources of Sulamī’s Minor Qurʾān Commentary,” Oriens 35 (1996): 35–56; idem, “The Qurʾān Commentary of al-Sulamī,” Islamic Studies Presented to Charles J. Adams, ed. W. Hallaq and D. Little (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991); al-Sulamī, Ḥaqāʾiq al-tafsīr, ed. S. ʿImrān, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2001).
[34] Al-Ḥallāj says it means: “He who is perfect in his essence is he who is always eternal and the one from whom all describable objects derive and towards whom all dependent entities are oriented” (al-kāmil fī dhātihi huwa al-abadī fī dawām al-awqāt al-aḥad al-kāʾin ʿanhu kullu manʿūt wa-ilayhi yasīr kullu marbūb). L. Massignon, Textes Hallagiens, in idem, Essai, 75.
[35] Massignon, Textes, 48. Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq’s commentary (taʾwīl) elaborates the mystical meanings conveyed by the letters of al-ṣamad: aḥadiyya, uluhiyya, ṣidq, mulk, dawām. See P. Nwyia, Spiritual Gems: The Mystical Qurʾān Commentary Ascribed to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq as Contained in Sulamīʹs Ḥaqāʾiq al-Tafsīr from the Text of Paul Nwyia, tr. F. Mayer (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2011), 192–95.
[36] Ibn Taymiyya, Tafsīr sūrat al-ikhlāṣ, ed. Ṭ. Y. Shāhīn (Cairo: Dār al-Ṭibāʿa al-Muḥammadiyya, 2007), 28–29.