Epilogue

The epilogue examines contemporary appropriations of hadith commentary among Islamist groups in the contemporary Islamic world, while contemplating the way an interpreter strives for timeliness and/or timelessness. The epilogue examines how rereadings of Mamluk-era hadith works were alternately deployed by a Pakistani Salafi commentator to bring about fairer labor practices, an al-Qaeda deputy to justify a rebellion in Egypt, and an anonymous propagandist for ISIS’s magazine (Dabiq) to justify the “revival of slavery” in Iraq and Syria. The epilogue concludes where the book began: ethnographic observations of prerevolution Damascus, where a renowned Damascene Shaykh, in the shade of Syria’s Baʿth party headquarters, delivered a live commentary on the Ṣaḥīḥ in part to contest Islamist understandings of the Prophet’s legacy.

Trustees across the Ocean

The first part of this chapter investigates continuities and changes as the figures and texts of the commentary tradition migrated eastward to India and found new life under the rich patronage of the sultanates in Gujarat and the Deccan from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. These patrons appeared to value both the intellectual and social goods on offer in the commentarial practice, and thus the fortunes of migrant hadith commentators and the political and military elite in India were intertwined. The second part of this chapter explores how reformist groups such as the Deobandis and the Ahl-i Hadith again turned to hadith commentary to navigate new challenges and opportunities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, as British colonial power intensified, established competing institutions of law and education, and introduced new technologies of print. Excerpts from the commentaries of Anwar Shah al-Kashmiri and Siddiq Hassan Khan are given special attention.

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.

The Perils of Public Commentary

In the seat of the eleventh-century Andalusian seaside kingdom of Dénia, a hadith was read aloud at a public gathering that stated that Muhammad once handwrote a peace agreement with his opponents outside of Mecca at Hudaybiyya. Despite the fact that the hadith’s apparent meaning complicated the notion that Muhammad was an unlettered Prophet (ummi), the commentator Abu al-Walid al-Baji (d. 1081) chose to take the hadith at face value: Muhammad physically wrote the pact himself. A controversy ensued, forcing the emir of Dénia to appeal to scholarly authorities in Sicily, North Africa, and the Near East to help quell the local outrage over Baji’s commentary. Placing textual narratives of this episode in the context of tenth- and eleventh-century Muslim scholarship on hadith in Andalusia, this chapter explores broader themes of how live and written commentaries of hadith (especially Baji’s Tahqiq al-Maddhab) came to serve as public and politicized forums in which commonly held Islamic legal and theological commitments could be taught, upheld, debated, and sometimes subverted.

Mysteries of the Thresholds

How did the deepening canonization of key hadith collections like Sahih al-Bukhari in the Mamluk period influence the commentator’s ability to introduce or discover new meanings in the text? This chapter takes up this question by tracking the development of a hermeneutic technique that justified not only one’s commentarial authority over Sahih al-Bukhari but also promised to disclose the “secret essence of Sahih al-Bukhari”: the analysis of Bukhari’s chapter headings (tarajim) and paratexts. While postclassical Andalusian hadith scholars wondered whether the problematic chapter headings in Bukhari’s Sahih were inadvertent errors, a marked change occurs among later commentators in Egypt, such as Ibn al-Munayyir (d. 1284) and Ibn Hajar, who viewed them as riddles containing Bukhari’s hidden intentions. Since the titles’ meanings were often underdetermined, commentators could claim to be faithful to Bukhari’s compilatory goal while simultaneously deriving novel meanings from the text.

For Sultans, Students, and Scholars

In Mamluk Cairo, the practice of hadith commentary came to be encyclopedic works composed as serial performances in the presence of students, patrons, and rivals that spanned several months and sometimes several decades. For students, commentators needed to prove their mastery of multiple disciplines, as well as display their pious devotion to preserving the legacy of the Prophet by aspiring to an endless commentary. While any mention of patrons was absent from the Andalusian commentarial context, patrons are praised by name in the text of some Mamluk-era hadith commentaries. In one rare case, a global political dispute between a commentator’s two patrons over a ritualized practice—dressing the Kaʿba—became fodder for commentaries. Since major hadith commentators of the Mamluk era sometimes held powerful political positions—Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani (d. 1449) and Badr al-Din al-‘Aynī (d. 1451) were chief justices for their respective legal schools—rivalries were sparked, in part, by competition over material and social goods. But a closer examination shows that the maintenance of intellectual integrity and other interpretive aims was also at stake in these rivalries. In this way, the commentarial predicament in the Mamluk era was one in which social and intellectual stakes were thickly intertwined.

Lost in Translation

This chapter examines two case studies in the translation of hadith commentary in South Asia. In the first section, I analyze the making of an English translation of Fad al-bari (“Bounty of the Creator”) by Shabbir Ahmad ‘Uthmani (d. 1949), a Deobandi hadith commentator, from the master’s lips in Arabic and Urdu to a book printed in English. This section grapples with ‘Uthmani’s fraught relationship with Western audiences and Western influence in India, which he appeared simultaneously to embrace and resist. In the second section, I examine the work of a contemporary Urdu commentator on prophetic traditions in Hyderabad, India, named Muhammad Khwaje al-Sharif. This section draws on ethnographic observations, interviews, and close readings of his texts to understand how his commentary navigate and emerge from the spaces, times, audiences, technologies, intellectual debates, and syncretic cultural milieu of twenty-first-century Hyderabad.

The Art of Concision

The tendency toward encyclopedism that characterized many intellectual traditions of the Mamluk era was not without its counterpoint: a movement toward concision, which reined in scholastic and interpretive excesses. In contrast to many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Suyuti (d. 1505) sought from the outset to achieve concision in this genre. In order to succeed in his aim of providing the audience with a reading experience “without toil,” Suyuti excluded much of the commentary tradition he had inherited. These exclusions, along with those brief opinions and clarifications he chose to transmit, offer us clues into the complex social and exegetical dynamics of Suyuti’s craft. Through a diachronic and comparative reading of illustrative points of intersection—including commentary on the topic of discretionary punishment (ta’zir)—this chapter shows the ways in which Suyuti struggled at times to strike a balance among competing social and interpretive aims.

Rivalry and Revision in the Manuscript Age

While the previous chapter largely drew on narrative sources to explore Mamluk commentarial culture, this one focuses on new manuscript evidence of Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani’s Fath al-bari to illustrate how multivolume works came to be revised over a period of thirty years, exploring, in greater detail, the evolving interpretive aims at stake. The manuscript sources demonstrate that Ibn Hajar and Badr al-Din al-ʿAynī must have been reading and responding to one another’s works-in-progress, and they made revisions accordingly, knowing their readership would be judging them against one another. It also shows just how difficult it was for authors to control the text of their work once it had been dictated, even when circulated as private copies among a limited readership. The experience of reading and writing in Mamluk intellectual culture could thus involve circulating and competitively responding to works-in-progress prior to and sometimes even after a work was declared complete. At stake in the life of this debate were both the social rewards (in which Ibn Hajar was a fearsome competitor) and the interpretive aims (in which his intentions for what the work could achieve in better preserving the meaning of the Prophet’s authenticated sayings and practices evolved over time).

The Inner World of the Interpretive Tradition

In this chapter readers delve deeper into the inner world of commentary and fine-grained commentarial reasoning, while keeping in mind the complex social and historical milieu of late Umayyad Andalusia, in which the Maliki legal orthodoxy sought to maintain dominance amid the fragmenting caliphate in Cordoba, the nascent Zahiri opposition, and the rapid growth of traditionism throughout Andalusia and North Africa. In the case of discretionary punishment (ta’zir), which the Maliki orthodoxy in Andalusia had firmly established as unrestricted, this chapter explores how Maliki judges like al-Muhallab (d. 1044) and Ibn Battal (d. 1057) reconciled a cluster of hadith that claimed to restrict discretionary punishment to ten lashes. In doing so, this chapter tracks the how debates evolved from an approach that dismissed the “ten lashes” hadith in favor of the orthodoxy’s unrestricted discretion to an approach that conceded to traditionalists that the “ten lashes” hadith was authoritative but, contra Zahiri critics, corralled its meaning in favor of broad judicial discretion.