In this excerpt, Māwardī, commenting on Q. 50:21 (“Every soul shall come, and with it a driver [sāʾiq] and a witness [shahīd]”), relates a report from Ḍaḥḥāk that explains the sāʾiqas God’s command. As for shahīd, Māwardī addresses the thorny question whether God, being all-knowing, should need witnesses by proposing two interpretations. First, he suggests that the witness (shahīd)is the resurrected themselves; second, he states that the sinner’s own hands and feet are the witnesses that testify against their owner. In his chapter comparing earthly justice with heavenly justice in the early Islamic imagination in Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, Christian Lange uses this source to highlight medieval exegetes’ efforts to avoid anthropomorphic interpretations of the Quran by reading verses in abstract terms.
This source is part of the Online Companion to the book Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, ed. Intisar A. Rabb and Abigail Krasner Balbale(ILSP/HUP 2017)—a collection of primary sources and other material used in and related to the book.