The Anonymity of a Commentator

Matthew B. Ingalls

Description

The Anonymity of a Commentator examines the life and writings of the Egyptian Sufi-scholar Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (d. 926/1520), the longest-serving chief Shāfi'ī justice to the Mamlūk sultanate during its final years. It analyzes al-Anṣārī's commentaries in the disciplines of Sufism and Islamic law as a case study to illustrate how and why Muslims produced commentaries in the later Islamic Middle Period and how the form and rhetoric of commentary writing furnished scholars like al-Anṣārī with a medium in which to express their creativity and adapt the received tradition to the needs of their time. Whereas twentieth-century scholars tended to view Muslim commentary texts as symbols of intellectual stagnation in and of themselves, contemporary scholars recognize that these texts are often the repositories of profound ideas, although they approach them with little guidance from their academic predecessors. The Anonymity of a Commentator aims to provide this guidance, through a close study of one of the most prolific commentary writers in Islamic history.
List of Figures and Tables
Transliteration Table
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Muslim Commentarial Practices

2. The Life of Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī

3. The Iḥkām and the Rhetoric of the Sufi Commentary

4. Fanning the Fire of Islamic Legal Change with the Mukhtaṣar-Sharḥ Bellows

5. The Legacy of al-Anṣārī

Conclusion Commentary, Canonization, and Creativity: A New Case for the "Era of Commentaries and Supercommentaries"

Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Islam
• History of religions
• History of the Middle East
• Egypt
• Egipto

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438485201
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE ANONYMITY OF A COMMENTATOR
SUNY series in Islam

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, editor
THE ANONYMITY OF A COMMENTATOR
ZAKARIYYĀ AL-AN Ṣ ĀRĪ AND THE RHETORIC OF MUSLIM COMMENTARIES
MATTHEW B. INGALLS
Cover image: Frederick Goodall, Sultan Hassan’s School, Cairo , 1861, oil on canvas. Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Ingalls, Matthew B., 1978– author.
Title: The anonymity of a commentator : Zakariyyā al-An ṣ ārī and the rhetoric of Muslim commentaries from the Later Islamic / Matthew B. Ingalls.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2021. | Series: SUNY series in Islam | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020053449 | ISBN 9781438485195 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438485201 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: An ṣ ārī, Zakarīyā ibn Mu ḥ ammad, approximately 1423–approximately 1520. | Sufis—Biography. | Sufism—Doctrines. | Qur ʾ an—Commentaries—History and criticism. | Hadith—Commentaries—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC BP80.A594 I54 2021 | DDC 297.1/2273122—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053449
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

For my two boys
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Transliteration Table
Acknowledgments
Introduction Chapter One Muslim Commentarial Practices Chapter Two The Life of Zakariyyā al-An ṣ ārī Chapter Three The I ḥ kām and the Rhetoric of the Sufi Commentary Chapter Four Fanning the Fire of Islamic Legal Change with the Mukhta ṣ ar-Shar ḥ Bellows Chapter Five The Legacy of al-An ṣ ārī Conclusion Commentary, Canonization, and Creativity: A New Case for the “Era of Commentaries and Supercommentaries”
Bibliography
Index
Figures and Tables
Figures 3.1 A sample folio from a manuscript of al-An ṣ ārī’s interwoven commentary Asnā l-ma ṭ ālib: shar ḥ Raw ḍ al- ṭ ālib . Umm al-Qurā University, Mecca, fols. 1v-2r. 4.1 A textual genealogy for the Manhaj al- ṭ ullāb and Fat ḥ al-wahhāb . 4.2 A textual genealogy for the Ta ḥ rīr Tanqī ḥ al-Lubāb , Tu ḥ fat al- ṭ ullāb , and Fat ḥ al-wahhāb . 4.3 A textual genealogy for the Asnā l-ma ṭ ālib . 4.4 A textual genealogy for al-Ghurar al-bahiyya , Khulā ṣ at al-fawā ʾ id , and Ḥ āshiya . 4.5 A visual representation of the processes of shar ḥ and ikhti ṣ ār . 5.1 The four authorities of the later Shāfi ʿ ī madhhab .
Tables 2.1 A timeline of Zakariyyā al-An ṣ ārī’s life. 2.2 A bibliography of texts attributed to Zakariyyā al-An ṣ ārī. 2.3 A list of teachers and texts that defined Zakariyyā al-An ṣ ārī’s education.
Transliteration Table
The following conventions have been adopted for the Arabic transliterations in the study below: ء ʾ ض ḍ ا ā ط ṭ ب b ظ ẓ ت t ع ʿ ث th غ gh ج j ف f ح ḥ ق q خ kh ك k د d ل l ذ dh م m ر r ن n ز z ه h س s و w, ū ش sh ي y, ī ص ṣ
Additionally, the Arabic short vowels ḍ amma [ ُ ], fat ḥ a [ َ ], and kasra [ ِ ] have been rendered with “u,” “a,” and “i,” respectively, while the shadda [ ّ ] is represented with a doubled consonant and the tanwīn with superscript. Finally, the Arabic definite article is rendered as “al-” (or “l-” if preceded by a long vowel) regardless of whether the following Arabic consonant is shamsī or qamarī .
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my sincerest gratitude to the following individuals for all of their assistance and encouragement in bringing the present monograph to print: Taha Abdul-Basser, Hussein Abdulsater, Asad Ahmed, Rumee Ahmed, Talal Al-Azem, the late Ather Ali, Omer Bajwa, Michele and Karl Becker, Rocío Amores Bello, Joel Blecher, Simon Bower, Gerhard Böwering, Jonathan Brown, Stephen Burge, Yousef Casewit, Ayesha Chaudhry, Francesco Chiabotti, Stephan Conermann, Bruce Craig, Jackie Crowley, John Curry, Garrett Davidson, Stephen Davis, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Ahmed El Shamsy, Dan Eisenberg, Musa Furber, Tarek Ghanem, Mohammad Gharaibeh, Alan Godlas, Frank Griffel, Josie Hendrickson, Sabrina Joseph, Annabel Keeler, Yasmine Khattab, Cornelis van Lit, James Lockhart, Joseph Lombard, Clark Lombardi, Moez Masoud, Richard McGregor, Matt Melvin-Kushki, Ebrahim Moosa, Elias Muhanna, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Martin Nguyen, Erik Ohlander, Bilal Orfali, Michael Perez, Judith Pfeiffer, David Powers, Yasir Qadhi, Ella Richards, Omar Sabbagh, Walid Saleh, Kristin Sands, Elham Seyedsayamdost, Ahmad al-Snubar, and Devin Stewart. I also thank the staff at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg, the Beinecke Library, the Chester Beatty Library, and the Wabbash Center.
A special word of thanks is due to James Peltz and Jenn Bennett-Genthner at SUNY Press, to my two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable and good-natured feedback on an earlier draft of my manuscript, and to Mohammed Rustom for his persistent encouragement and advice over the past few years.
Several fellowships made the research for this book possible. These include an Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg Junior Fellowship, the H. P. Kraus Fellowship in Early Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Library, a Martin Nelson Summer Research Award, and a Wabash Center Summer Fellowship. I thank the fellowship selection committees for their generous support.
Finally, I wish to thank my family for all of their love and patience.
An earlier version of the first subsection of chapter 3 was originally published in the Journal of Sufi Studies in 2013, while the second and third subsections of the chapter were originally published in the journal Oriens in the same year.
Introduction
Twentieth-century scholars of Islamic history took it for granted that Muslim scholarship declined after the thirteenth century. Over the past two decades, historians have broken decisively from this decline narrative, and many are excited to rediscover the last five hundred years of Muslim intellectual production, which as an object of historical inquiry still remains largely unexamined. Although the decline narrative is certainly not dead in the field of Islamic studies, 1 it is moribund, at least in its crassest forms. Scholars nonetheless disagree as to whether the legacy of the decline narrative still defines the field in subtler ways, 2 though it would be hard to deny that Islamic studies as a whole has grown to acknowledge the creative merits of Muslim scholarship from more recent centuries.
One stumbling block in appreciating later Muslim scholarship is the outward form that this scholarship often assumes. Here I am referring specifically to the commentarial form that came to dominate the Islamic disciplines beginning in the later Islamic middle period (1250–1500 CE), although similar stumbling blocks have been encountered in the study of premodern Arabic literature in the context of encyclopedias and other compilatory texts. 3 Whereas twentieth-century scholars of Islam viewed commentary texts as a sign of intellectual stagnation in and of themselves, contemporary scholars recognize that these texts are often the repertories of profound thought. Nevertheless, they approach them from scratch, having inherited little insight from the previous generations of researchers who dismissed these texts as derivative.
Contemporary scholars of Islam thus possess the right attitude toward the Muslim commentarial tradition, but they also recognize the Herculean task of analyzing this tradition on its own terms. Even the act of gathering works of commentary is rarely simple. One scholar, by way of example, estimates that only 5 percent of the hundreds of commentaries mentioned in his handlist of philosophical commentaries are currently available to scholars in print. 4 Although he wrote of this problem in 2004 and limited his estimate to commentaries written in philosophy after the twelfth century, the current study of commentaries from across the disciplines of Islamic studies hardly fares much better.
The way forward is for contemporary scholars of Islam to continue their work on the fundamentals of commentary studies—that is, to survey the textual record and analyze it with reference to its own internal values and structures. This work must begin at the level of individual authors, intellectual networks, or textual genealogies before its findings can be extended to assess larger structures like entire intellectual disciplines, which may be the task of the next generation of scholars. As for assessing even larger civilizational trajectories, the horizon remains farther away still, if not forever out of grasp, and it is for this reason that claims of intellectual decline strike many contemporary scholars as especially absurd. Nevertheless, if scholarship from the last century has taught us anything, it is that the burden of proof skews suspiciously in favor of those arguing for Muslim civilizational decline, while even the most basic analysis of the commentarial tradition reveals the hollowness and cynicism inherent in this decline narrative.
In the spirit of continuing the good fight against the decline narrative, the book that follows participates in the ongoing project of Islamic commentary studies through an examination of the life, thought, and legacy of the Egyptian scholar Zakariyyā al-An ṣ ārī (d. 926/1520). It begins at the level