Hadith Commentary: Continuity and Change

Hadith commentary has been a central site of Islamic intellectual life for more than a millennium, across diverse periods, regions and sects. This is the first volume of scholarly essays ever collected on the key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary. The book unfolds chronologically from the early centuries of Islam to the modern period, and readers will discover continuities and changes as a group of international experts offer illuminating studies of Sunnis, Shi'is and Sufis who interpret and debate the meaning of hadith over a wide terrain: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, India, and further. The volume also models a variety of methodological approaches, including social history, intellectual history, the study of religion, and digital history. By highlighting both differences and commonalities as the practice of hadith commentary circulated across distant eras and lands, this volume sheds new light on the way Muslims have historically understood the meaning of Muhammad's example.

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.