04

He writes the chain, then he walks on

الإسناد في التفسير

Tabari is not Bukhari. He does not wait for a report to be sahih before he sets it down. He sets it down with its men. A weak road sits beside a strong one. That is the same method as his history, said in the introduction there: if a report is strange, the fault is the transmitter’s, not the compiler’s. Later abridgements drop the chains and keep the meanings. That is useful. It is not Tabari. On Nur you see his Arabic as a public edition carries it — often without the full tree of names. The printed Jami al-Bayan is where the isnad still stands.

A line in Tabari is a claim that someone said this. It is not yet a ruling that this is the ayah. Weigh the names. Then read ‘Abu Jafar said.’

Ibn Kathir, two centuries later, names weak reports more often than Tabari does. That is a later filter, not a different religion.