![]()
Chapter One
Muslim Commentarial Practices
The present chapter situates the remainder of the book by providing a general description of Islamic commentary texts and Muslim commentarial practices during the Islamic middle period. In writing it, I have relied on both the primary- and secondary-source literature, though when compared with the remaining chapters of the book, I have given greater weight here to the secondary literature. In order to filter the data found in this secondary literature, I have chosen to emphasize those phenomena that are most conducive to an analysis of Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’s commentaries specifically, and to understanding the processes that brought them into existence.
The chapter begins with a basic description of important socioliterary trends that defined the Islamic middle period and then turns to examining why Muslim scholars saw the need for commentary texts in the first place. It next describes the form of Islamic commentary texts as we might encounter them in manuscript form today, while using this occasion to introduce readers to some technical terms that are essential to conceptualizing the culture of commentary writing within the context of premodern Islamic scholarship. The chapter then turns to the connections between pedagogy and the writing of commentary texts to illustrate the processes through which Muslim study circles brought new commentaries into existence. Here I paint a picture of these processes for the benefit of those readers who may have little background in Islamic intellectual history. My goal in sketching it has been to provide a digestible description that avoids oversimplification and does justice to the larger tradition without limiting itself to any one intellectual discipline. Finally, the chapter concludes with a brief note on the rhetoric of anonymity that characterizes commentary writing within most canonical and classical traditions throughout history and its connections to the authority projected by, and perceived in, commentary writers.
Textual Trends during the Islamic Middle Period
It could be argued that the need for commentary was written into the DNA of the Islamic tradition. For as long as the Qurʾān and Sunna have existed in the minds of Muslims, they have been conceptually separated more at the level of their textual form than as discrete scriptural essences, and the job of bridging the textual gap between them would fall to Muslim exegetes who reunited them within their works of tafsīr (Qurʾānic exegesis).1 Historians who have studied the development of commentaries within the Islamic tradition often begin their narratives by referencing these early works of tafsīr and other rudimentary glosses on pre-Islamic poetry before shifting to nonexegetical commentaries that had emerged by the early fourth/tenth century within the disciplines of Arabic grammar and Islamic law. Commentary works would appear soon thereafter in other intellectual disciplines, thus setting the stage for the Islamic commentary to become the defining medium of scholarly production during the later Islamic middle period (roughly 1258 to 1500 CE), particularly in Syria and Egypt under the Mamlūk sultans.2
A few trends in the intellectual culture of the Islamic middle period help to situate this explosion in commentary writing and are worth mentioning here in brief. The first is what Konrad Hirschler has called “textualization” whereby the written word would come to resemble a fetish in many corners of Muslim society and would finally outstrip the oral tradition that had previously held a position of importance that was parallel with, if not superior to, it. During the Islamic middle period, written texts were integrated into public rituals and used in symbolic readings like never before, while their perceived autonomy as storehouses of knowledge increased within the public imagination.3 Another intellectual trend that characterized the period was the popularization of learning activities; it coincided with the proliferation of waqf properties (Islamic endowments)—mosques, madrasas, khānaqāhs (Sufi hospices), etc.—in which these activities took place. Formal and informal learning activities now extended to much broader demographics of Muslim society,4 while study within waqf institutions, particularly madrasas, became more accessible to adolescents from the margins of society. Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’s biography perhaps illustrates this latter phenomenon like no other. Scholarly lessons before large audiences of students and lay readers was another result of this popularization of learning that defined the period, as can be glimpsed, for instance, in the blending of audition certifications (ijāzat al-samāʿ and ijāzat al-qirāʾa) whereby one’s license to transmit a text became equally valid whether a person read the text before a teacher or was merely present in the audience of students as the text was read.5 Nevertheless, by the close of the Islamic middle period in the tenth/sixteenth century, collation notes would largely displace audition certificates within the manuscript record, as teachers shifted away again from large audiences in favor of smaller groups of students whose notes were collated and scrutinized in a more intimate manner.6
Through processes that are examined in more detail below, the proliferation of waqf institutions of learning during the Islamic middle period also allowed manuscripts to be produced (and stored) with more efficiency than before. This streamlining of manuscript production, along with the growing perception of written texts as autonomous storehouses of knowledge, meant that scholars and other intellectuals felt a stronger need for texts that were searchable and able to be mined for specific information. Because of this need, the Islamic middle period witnessed an explosion in new conventions in the layout and design of manuscripts to increase the ease and speed of reading them, as can be glimpsed, for example, in the appearance of overlining, rubrication, indexes, and clearer techniques to mark the end of quoted material.7 Encyclopedic and anthological works benefitted especially from these new scribal conventions; they were now accessible to readers who wished to search them quickly and on their own time, and would thus become immensely popular during the Mamlūk period.8 Moreover, writers of commentary works used many of these same scribal conventions, which helped in making commentaries the default medium of Islamic scholarship in Mamlūk lands.
Before examining the process of commentary writing by Muslim scholars, it is necessary to understand the reasons why Muslims saw the need for commentary texts in the first place. If commentary is viewed at the most generic level as the interpretation of a canonical tradition, then we can begin with the theories of Jonathan Smith, who lists five situations that are more likely than others to prompt a community to apply their interpretive energies to a canon: for purposes of divination, law, legitimation, classification, and speculation.9 Of these five situations, Muslim commentary writers from the later Islamic middle period were especially motivated by their need for legal evolution (law), for establishing their intellectual credentials (legitimation), and for refining disciplines that had grown exceedingly complex by this time (classification). Furthermore, to Smith’s original list we can add the motive of preservation, as can be glimpsed whenever Muslim authors used their commentaries as repositories for storing information that might otherwise be lost to future generations.10 For their part, the goals of legitimation and classification that motivated Muslim commentators each connected to the growing homogeneity of Muslim religious discourse that prevailed in Mamlūk urban centers. As notions of orthodoxy became standardized within this intellectual context, a scholar’s task of differentiating himself from his peers became more challenging, while higher value was placed on activities of knowledge specialization (i.e., within a single discipline) over knowledge brokerage (i.e., across multiple disciplines).11 Well suited for the purposes of knowledge specialization, commentary texts would function as a productive medium in which a commentator could demonstrate his competence in a subject matter over that of his scholarly peers.
Writing in the eleventh/seventeenth century, Ḥājjī Khalīfa (d. 1068/1657) provides three justifications for writing commentaries on preexisting texts that we must otherwise assume were intended by their authors to stand alone. The first justification obtains when the author of an original text is so concise and precise that some readers require the aid of a commentary to grasp the subtle meanings that are hidden on the pages before them. The second occurs whenever the author of the origin...
