Afterword: More Comments, Further Questions

Summary

The preceding chapters have presented rich illustrations of continuity and change in the hadith commentary tradition across sectarian divisions and genres, over a period dating back more than a millennium and spanning a region from the Mediterranean littoral to Persia and India. Before mapping out some future directions for the field, I first discuss one final example I encountered recently that aptly captures this interplay between continuity and change in the tradition of hadith commentary.

Tucked away in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan is, at first glance, an unremarkable manuscript of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. It was originally copied in 827/1424, during the very heyday of Mamlūk-era commentaries on hadith. And yet in the margins of this text we find notes from four separate hands. These reflect the practices of scholarly communities from the ninth/ fifteenth, tenth/sixteenth, twelfth/eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries (see Figure A.1). These readers, though separated by long stretches of time, nevertheless returned to the margins of these delicate pages, to this very same paper, ink and glue to recite the text aloud, add their corrections and offer novel comments on the sayings of Muhammad. In places throughout this manuscript, these various marginal comments from different eras and places intertwine, with the notes of the twelfth-/eighteenth-century reader decorating either side of those of their tenth-/sixteenth-century predecessors.

The most modern hand to have read and annotated the text is the sparest, but also the most intriguing. This layer of commentary is attributed to a student who testified that, during Ramadan, he heard the text from the lips of the ageing iconoclastic hadith scholar from Yemen, Muḥammad al-Shawkānī, a year or so before al-Shawkānī's death in 1248/1833. Al-Shawkānī was best known for his barbed commentaries and his call to revive bold methods of interpretation that mandated a direct interface with the hadith, a view that challenged the entrenched orthodoxies undergirding Islamic legal institutions in the nineteenth century. And yet the periodic annotations preserved in this volume and attributed to al-Shawkānī are somewhat mundane. For instance, al-Shawkānī typically paused his student's recitation to ask that the student note that a variant of a hadith might be found in another section of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī.