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Chapter 9 Kalāla in Early Islamic Tradition It is He who has revealed to you the Book, with verses which are precise in meaning (muhk̆amāt) and which are the Mother of the Book, and others which are ambiguous (mutashābihāt). As for those in whose hearts there is vacillation, they follow what is ambiguous in it, seeking sedition and intending to interpret it. However, no one except God knows its interpretation. Q. 3:7 The desires of interpreters are good because without them the world and the text are tacitly declared to be impossible; perhaps they are, but we must live as if the case were otherwise. —Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, 126 Q. *4:12b referred to a man who designates a daughter-in-law (*kalla) or wife as his heir. This sub-verse was revised by the early Muslim community in such a manner as to produce a text that refers to a man or a woman who is inherited by kalāla. The word kalāla was an artificial invention that was not part of the Arabic lexicon during the lifetime of the Prophet. To complicate matters, the word kalāla occurs only twice in the Qurān, and it has no equivalent in any other Semitic language. In the first half of the first century a.h., very few Muslims would have known the meaning of this word. The fact that one finds no trace of the word *kalla in the literary sources suggests that the Muslim community was—and remains—unaware of its existence . It was not until the consonantal skeleton of the Qurān had been fixed that the work of tafsı̄r, or interpretation, could begin. It was the received text that was studied by the exegetes, hădı̄th specialists, and grammarians. We turn now to their treatment of the word kalāla in Q. 4:12b and 4:176, beginning with the earliest treatises and moving forward in time until the beginning of the fourth/tenth century. The purpose of this exercise is twofold: First, to show how the successive layers of the Islamic tradition accumulated over the course of the first three centuries a.h.; and, second, to scrutinize the sources for clues that may explain why the early Muslim community revised the consonantal skeleton of the Qurān. 198 Chapter 9 Tafsêr and H˘adêth With one notable exception, the Muslim exegetes who flourished between ca. 50 and 150 a.h. are silent about Q. 4:12b and 176. Arguably the first extant commentary on the Qurān is that of Mujāhid b. Jabr (d. 102/720), a Meccan Successor associated with the school of Ibn Abbās (d. 68/687).1 Regarded as the most knowledgeable expert on the Qurān of his age, Mujāhid nevertheless was criticized for excessive reliance on Jews and Christians as sources of information.2 In his discussion of 4:12b, Mujāhid has nothing to say about kalāla, although he does make a brief comment about the meaning of the phrase ghayra mud≥ārrin (“without injury”), which occurs at the end of l. 3.3 Nor does he have anything to say about 4:176. Indeed, Mujāhid’s treatment of Sūrat al-Nisā ends with v. 174.4 In another early commentary, al-Dăhh̆ă¯k (d. 105/723) does mention that Q. 4:8 was abrogated by āyat almawa ̄rı̄th or “the verse of the inheritances”—although he has nothing to say about the contents or meaning of Q. 4:11–12.5 His treatment of Sūrat al-Nisā ends with v. 172.6 The same pattern holds in the fragmentary commentary of Sufyān al-Thawrı̄ (d. 161/778), a hădı̄th-oriented legal scholar who also wrote a treatise on inheritance. Like Mujāhid, Sufyān’s only comment on v. 12b relates to the expression ghayra mud≥ārrin ; similarly, his treatment of Sūrat al-Nisā ends with v. 174—despite the fact that we know, from his inheritance treatise, that he was familiar with v. 176.7 Thus, neither Mujāhid, nor al-D˘ahh̆ă¯k, nor Sufyān al-Thawrı̄ has anything to say about v. 176. One wonders if they were aware of the existence of this verse which, as I argued in Chapter 8...

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