Hadith Commentary

Joel Blecher is Associate Professor of History at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, the author of Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2018), and co-translator of Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s Merits of the Plague (Penguin Classics, 2023). His other writings have appeared in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Islamic Law & Society, Oriens, and several edited volumes. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Library of Congress, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Stefanie Brinkmann is Research Fellow at the “Bibliotheca Arabica Project” at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. Trained in Arabic, Persian, and Roman Studies, she had acting professorships at the universities of Freiburg and Hamburg, and was member and principal investigator of a number of manuscript projects. She has published in the fields of manuscript studies, especially on hadith manuscripts, material culture in hadith, and classical Arabic poetry.

• List of Figures Notes on Contributors Preface Introduction: What is Hadith Commentary? Joel Blecher and Stefanie BrinkmannPart I Formations and Developments in the Early andMiddle Periods1 Between Philology and Hadith Criticism: The Genre ofSharḥ Gharīb al-Ḥadīth Stefanie Brinkmann2 The Hermeneutics of al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā: The Interpretationof akhbār al-āḥād in Kitāb al-Amālī Ali Aghaei3 ‘Blessed are the Strangers (ghurabāʾ)’: An Apocalyptic Hadithon the Virtues of Loneliness, Sadness and Exile Youshaa Patel4 Sufi Contributions to Hadith Commentary Samer Dajani5 Ibn Rajab’s Commentary on al-Nawawī’s Forty Hadith:Innovation and Audience in the Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm wa-l-ḥikam Mohammad Gharaibeh6 The Words of the Imām beyond Philosophy and Tradition:Shīʿī Hadith Commentaries in the Ṣafavid Period Sajjad RizviPart II Modern Recollections and Reimaginings7 Contesting Ḥanaf ī Thought in a Twentieth-century TurkishHadith Commentary Susan Gunasti8 Debating Authority and Authenticity in Modern South AsianHadith Commentaries: Muḥammad Zakariyyā Kāndhalawī’Awjaz al-masālik Ali Altaf Mian9 ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī and Exegetical Hadiths in al-Mῑzān:A Contemporary Imāmī Commentary on Hadith? Shadi Nafisi10 Studying Hadith Commentaries in the Digital Age Maroussia Bednarkiewicz, Aslisho Qurboniev andGowaart Van Den BosscheAfterword: More Comments, Further Questions Joel BlecherIndex

The papers in this volume span the pre-modern and the modern, address Sunni, Shii and Sufi writings, cover different geographical settings, as well as highlight digital methods. Altogether, this is a superb and much-needed contribution that attests to the importance of a discourse that has been undervalued in the secondary sources.