In this excerpt, Ṭabarī comments on the meaning of Q. 50:21, “Every soul shall come, and with it a driver (sāʾiq) and a witness (shahīd).” Ṭabarī adduces reports on the authority of Qatāda and Mujāhid specifying what the “driver” (sāʾiq) is. For Qatāda, the sāʾiqis one who drives people to their reckoning (ḥisāb), whereas Mujāhid identifies the sāʾiqas a scribe (kātib). 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 these reports to highlight parallels between the functionaries of the heavenly court and those found in earthly courtrooms, noting that Qatāda’s interpretation of sāʾiq brings to mind a court sheriff (jilwāz) who coerces recalcitrant litigants to appear before a judge, while Mujāhid’s scribe was an established functionary of the court by the end of the first century of Islam. Nevertheless, there were also more abstract presentations that aimed to avoid interpreting the verse in anthropomorphic terms. Ṭabarī provides an alternative report on the authority of Mujāhid that claims that the people are actually “driven” to God’s command (amr).
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.