In his preface to al-Basit, he lays out in great detail the course of his education, starting with lexicography, grammar, literature, and rhetoric—that is, the entirety of the Arabic philological heritage as it was refined by the fifth or sixth century.
He studied the dictionary of Abu Mansur al-Azhari (d. 370/980), read most of the diwans of the Arabic poets, spent his early years with grammarians and rhetoricians, and never skipped a significant piece of poetry.
It is clear that al-Wāḥidī's career was influenced by his prosody master, Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Abd Abdallah al-Arudi (who passed away after 416/1025).
[6] According to one incident, al-Arudi the prosody scholar once chastised al-Wahidi for spending too much time on poetry and pagan sciences and exhorted him “to devote himself to the study of exegesis of the Book of God.” He strongly recommended his student to study exegesis with “This man whom students from distant lands journey to seek out, while you neglect him despite the fact that he is a neighbour.” According to al-Wahidi, “this man” refers to “the teacher (al-Ustadh), and guide (al-Imam), Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Ibrahim al-Tha'labi.”[7] Al-Wahidi also tells us that he studied all of the main grammarians, including Inbah al-Ruwat by Ibn al-Qifti (d. 646/1248).
Al-Wāḥidī also studied under travelling intellectuals who came through Nishapur, including the western Islamic teacher Abu al-Hasan Umran b. Musa al-Maghribi (d. 430/1038), who was a grammarian.
[9] This is corroborated by the anecdotes of numerous customs mentioned in his writings, where he consistently references the year and the place where he first heard a particular tradition.
The Mu'tazilites were well known for employing philological interpretational methods in their Quranic commentaries, and this methodology was permeating the mainstream Sunni tafsīr tradition.
It was not al-Zamakhshari's doing, nor was Zamakhsharī's accomplishment a reflection of the depth of this relationship; A significant cultural transfer of the philological heritage of Qur'anic interpretation into Sunnism was orchestrated by Al-Wāhidī.
Al-Basit's introduction makes it apparent that he thought that literature and grammar were the cornerstones and essential components of exegesis, and that the writings of earlier exegetes were deficient inasmuch as they had not been employed.
In fact, he asserts that the early layer of tafsir itself needed to be explained in a number of ways in order to demonstrate how it was an explanation of the Quran.
Jahili poetry will eventually give way to the Quran as the source of linguistic exemplars in Arabic grammar manuals.
[14] Tafsir also had to contend with the emergence of scholastic theology (kalam) as a distinct field of study and its assimilation into Sunnism as a part of its paradigm.