10 - Studying Hadith Commentaries in the Digital Age

Summary

‘[Hadith] is the most eminent of sciences’ (min mukhtārāt al-ʿulūm ʿaynhā), writes Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī (d. 855/1451) in the introduction to ʿUmdat al-qārī, his voluminous commentary on al-Bukhārī's (d. 256/870) Ṣaḥīḥ. His remark is part of a long rhetorical acclamation of prophetic traditions; it expresses the idea that hadith and its auxiliary disciplines occupied a central position in the Islamic oral and written tradition. This centrality has continued in the digital age, and various apps, forums and video channels devoted to the teaching and commentary of hadith have appeared. Many classical hadith texts are now also available in digital editions in online libraries such as Shamela or ShiaOnlineLibrary (al-Maktaba al-Shīʿiyya). The digitised texts from these collections can be used for traditional close reading but also for computational analysis. The advent of such online libraries facilitates the navigation and extraction of text to build corpora tailored to new research questions, thus radically changing historians’ workflow. Yet there are still significant obstacles to the digital availability of hadith literature and these obstacles inhibit the building of large corpora for computational analysis.

In this essay we reflect on the challenges involved in corpus building for hadith studies as well as the advances already made. We specifically focus on the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI), a large, academically curated corpus of Arabic texts sourced from various online libraries. This corpus is continuously vetted and expanded by scholarly contributions. We discuss its advantages for computational macro-analysis and for more traditional close reading, and survey recent research in digital hadith studies. As an example of the possibilities of computational macro-analysis, we focus on assessing the output of the software ‘passim’, which has identified millions of instances of text reuse – places where texts share materials with one another – across the OpenITI corpus by employing a set of algorithms to detect and align similar passages of text. These instances of reuse may be the result of citation, plagiarism, use of common sources and many other forms of intertextuality. Text reuse is used in this chapter as a broad analytical category that may account for all these forms. In the final part of this essay we present examples of this text reuse data, specifically as it applies to the study of hadith commentaries.