Introduction: What is Hadith Commentary?

Summary

The tradition of hadith commentary has been a central site of Islamic intellectual life for more than a millennium, yet it has only recently attracted scholarly attention among Islamicists. Building on this recent work, Hadith Commentary: Continuity and Change is the first book to collect a range of scholarly essays on key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary across a variety of periods and areas. Addressing the diversity of sects, periods and regions in which hadith commentary developed, this volume demonstrates that novel intellectual activity did not decline following the so-called ‘golden age’ of Islam, and that in fact the medium of commentary thrived. This edited volume pushes the field of hadith studies to expand beyond analyses of hadith transmission, and into the vast and understudied world of the hadith's normative significance to those communities that held them to be authentic.

The present volume is designed for specialists in the field of Islamic studies, but may also appeal to non-specialists working on commentary traditions in other religions and cultures of learning. This volume aims to expand the boundaries of the nascent field of hadith commentary by covering a broad time frame, from the beginnings of commentarial activity in the second/eighth century to the modern voices of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, by traversing a vast geographical area from regions across the Islamic world, by combining different methodological approaches, and by examining commentary traditions from Sunni, Shi‘i and Sufi traditions.

Before we embark on this ambitious task, a fundamental question must first be addressed: What is a hadith commentary? Many might answer the question by simply pointing to line-by-line commentaries (sharḥ, pl. shurūḥ) explicating hadiths in a collection such as Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. Yet this is just one kind of hadith commentary, albeit an important one.

Joel Blecher describes the range of hadith commentary as follows:

Construed broadly, the term could include any formal or informal oral or written gloss on a given ḥadīth. Narrowly defined, the practice of ḥadīth commentary refers to a cumulative and transregional tradition of line-by-line Muslim scholarly exegesis on individual ḥadīth and ḥadīth collections, from the late Islamic formative period to the present day.