Mujahid ibn Jabr
c. 642 CE–c. 722 CE · Kufa
Mujahid ibn Jabr (kunya: Abu al-Hajjaj; nisbas al-Makki, "the Meccan," and al-Makhzumi) was an early Qur'an scholar of the generation known as the Tabi'un, the "Followers" who came after the Prophet Muhammad's Companions. The biographical tradition (notably al-Dhahabi's Siyar A'lam al-Nubala, drawing on Ibn Sa'd and Ibn Hibban) reports that he was born in Mecca in the year 21 AH (c. 642 CE), during the caliphate of Umar, and that he was a mawla — a non-Arab client or freedman — affiliated with the Banu Makhzum clan of Quraysh.
He is best known as a close student of Abd Allah ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet and a celebrated authority on Qur'anic interpretation (tafsir). Tradition holds that Mujahid reviewed the entire Qur'an with Ibn Abbas several times, asking about the occasion of each verse. Later scholars ranked him among the foremost transmitters of tafsir; the jurist Sufyan al-Thawri is reported to have named him first among four to take exegesis from. His reported interpretations are quoted heavily in the major classical commentaries.
Sources are based in Mecca but describe him as much-travelled; al-Dhahabi notes he reportedly "settled in Kufa at the end of his life." He is said to have died in Mecca around 102-104 AH (c. 720-722 CE), by one report while prostrating in prayer, aged in his eighties. The exact death year is disputed in the sources.
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Kufa
What they did here
Al-Dhahabi reports that Mujahid 'is said to have settled in Kufa at the end of his life, and he used to travel and move about frequently.' Kufa was a major centre of early learning. The report is transmitted in the biographical tradition but the timing and length of stay are not precisely fixed.
About Kufa
Kufa, on the Euphrates in central Iraq near Najaf, was a garrison-town (misr) founded by the Muslims around 638 during the conquest of Iraq. It became a major centre of early Arabic grammar, jurisprudence, and Shi'i scholarship, and for a time the capital of the caliph Ali; the traditionist Ibn Abi Shayba (d. 849) and the Twelver scholar Ibn Babawayh al-Saduq (d. 991) are among those connected to it.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Mujahid ibn Jabr’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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