M
Muqatil ibn Sulayman
Muqatil ibn Sulayman
705 CE–767 CE · Baghdad
Muqatil ibn Sulayman al-Balkhi (d. 150 AH / 767 CE) was an early Muslim Quranic exegete of Khurasanian origin, remembered as the author of Tafsir Muqatil, one of the earliest surviving complete commentaries on the entire Quran. Born in Balkh around 700-710 CE, he spent his early life in Khurasan (Balkh and Marw) before migrating to Iraq, where he settled in Basra and Baghdad and ultimately died in Basra. Working in the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, he was an influential and prolific transmitter of exegetical and narrative material, and his tafsir is a foundational source for the early history of Quranic interpretation. Later hadith critics frequently questioned his reliability as a transmitter and criticized statements attributed to him as anthropomorphic in their depiction of God, while still drawing on his exegetical work.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →
✦
Stop 1 of 4
BaghdadIraq
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Baghdad
Baghdad, on the Tigris, is the capital of modern Iraq. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded it in 762 as his capital, and for five centuries it was a leading centre of Islamic learning, with the House of Wisdom, the Nizamiyya madrasa and many jurists, Sufis and scientists; Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, eponym of the Qadiriyya order, is buried there. The Mongol sack of 1258 ended the caliphate, and the city later passed to Ottoman rule. It was also a seat of the patriarchs of the Church of the East and of the exilarch who headed Babylonian Jewry. Its Jewish community, whose foremost nineteenth-century rabbi was Yosef Hayyim (Ben Ish Chai), almost entirely emigrated to Israel in 1950-52.
The world in their lifetime
✦
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Muqatil ibn Sulayman’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.