Gatekeepers of the Law
While Maliki commentators in postclassical Andalusia did not need to demonstrate knowledge of and personal connection to the genealogy of a canonical collection of hadith to be authorized to interpret it, a scholar’s genealogy became an important prerequisite for aspiring commentators in the late Mamluk era. Moreover, a subtler marker of authority was a commentator’s conspicuous mastery of the rarified rules and procedures of a given legal approach. For Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, a Shafiʿi, knowledge of the chains of transmission informed his link to Sahih al-Bukhari as well as his legal approach to it. For Badr al-Din al-ʿAynī, a Hanafi, his expertise in the sciences of rhetoric was, for his students, qualification enough. But commentators’ genealogies as hadith scholars and training as jurists were not merely symbolic credentials, intended to rarify knowledge and exclude certain people from access to it. Their training also played a role, within the complex social and intellectual matrix of the Mamluk scholarly scene, in shaping the way commentators interpreted canonical collections of hadith.