Mercy in Disagreement

words, just this four-word phrase gives rise to over two dozen scholarly debates. Similarly, Surah Al-Fatiha, though comprising only a few lines, contains such a wealth of content that its discussion spans a full 43 pages in the commentary. As you progress through this 20-volume tafsir, you’ll find that scarcely a single page is free from scholarly debates and divergent viewpoints. Even when you reach the concluding chapters of the Quran—AlMu‘awwidhatayn (Chapter Al-Falaq and Chapter Al-Nas)— you encounter profound disagreements. Among them is a particularly serious view attributed to Abdullah ibn Mas‘ud, a companion of the Prophet, who held that these two chapters were supplications for seeking protection and not part of the Quran itself. (Tafsir al-Qurtubi, Vol. 20, p. 251) The same applies—more extensively—to hadith. Take any commentary on hadith; for example, Fath al-Bari, a classical multi-volume commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari. When you open it, the first hadith you will find is: “Actions are based on intentions.” This hadith is widely transmitted and highly authentic. Yet, in the nearly nine-page explanation of this single hadith, words such as ikhtalafu and ikhtulifa— indicating scholarly disagreement—appear six times. The entire thirteen-volume Fath al-Bari is similarly filled with interpretive differences. After that, if you look into books on jurisprudence and theology, it will appear as though they represent an endless forest of disagreements. You will likely not find a single issue