Abstract
The article analyzes a 2002 edition of Tuḥfat al-murīd ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd, a supercommentary written by Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) on Ibrāhīm al-Laqānī’s (d. 1632) base text in Ashʿarī theology. The edition was edited by the Muslim religious scholar and former grand mufti of Egypt, ʿAlī Jumʿa (b. 1952). The article shows that in Jumʿa’s edition taḥqīq is a practice of selecting a text that has been widely available, reframing its importance in the introduction and footnotes, and making the text understandable to contemporary readers. In his selection and framing of the text, Jumʿa situates al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya against Salafī opponents, while his explicit audience for the edition consists of Muslim students. The article argues that Jumʿa’s taḥqīq, which is both ideologically and pedagogically oriented, reflects his larger religiopolitical project of bolstering the authority and intellectual legacy of al-Azhar in the context of inter-Sunni rivalry in the late twentieth century.
Introduction
In 2002, Egypt’s Dār al-Salām Press published a new edition of Tuḥfat al-murīd ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd, which is a ḥāshiya (plural: ḥawāshī) or supercommentary written by the late-nineteenth-century Egyptian scholar Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) on Ibrāhīm al-Laqānī’s (d. 1632) matn, or base text, in Ashʿarī theology.1 The text was edited by the Muslim religious scholar and former grand mufti of Egypt, ʿAlī Jumʿa (b. 1952). Editions of al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya were printed numerous times in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries, making it far from a forgotten text.2 Unlike the editors of Arabic texts published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for whom the role of the muḥaqqiq, or editor, was one of “rediscovering” texts that had been otherwise forgotten or neglected, Jumʿa’s edition of al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya suggests a different kind of taḥqīq.3 The article shows that in Jumʿa’s edition, taḥqīq is a practice that includes selecting a text that has been available in print for more than a century, reframing its importance in the introduction and footnotes, and facilitating its comprehension (a process he describes as taysīr) for contemporary readers. In his selection and framing of the text, Jumʿa implicitly situates al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya against unnamed Salafi opponents, i.e., those who follow what Bernard Haykel describes as “purist Salafism.”4 Yet in Jumʿa’s professed aim of taysīr, he directs his work not at Salafi opponents but at Muslim students. The article argues that Jumʿa’s taḥqīq, which is both ideologically and pedagogically oriented, reflects his larger religiopolitical project of bolstering the authority and intellectual legacy of al-Azhar, the preeminent Sunni institution that in the twentieth century became the representative of “official” Islam in Egypt, in the context of inter-Sunni rivalry, specifically between al-Azhar and Salafism.5
Jumʿa’s taḥqīq fits into the paradigm of ideological contestation in editorial spaces that Ahmed Khan and others have described between Salafi editors and “late Sunni traditionalists.”6 Most scholarship on this editorial rivalry has focused on the Salafi side, demonstrating, for instance, that Salafi editors regard hadith commentary as the most suitable medium for confronting Ashʿarī theologians.7 Yet this analysis has left the specific strategies and narratives of Salafism’s opponents little explored.8 This article homes in on one of these opponents, ʿAlī Jumʿa, to analyze his editorial strategies, which, as the article demonstrates, include reappropriating rhetoric and concepts like tawḥīd, daʿwa, and al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ that tend to be associated with Salafism, and locating them instead within the late Sunni approach of Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī. The article also demonstrates that Jumʿa’s strategy is to idealize the intellectual approach that al-Bājūrī represents, rather than engage in direct polemics. In idealizing al-Bājūrī, he implicitly counters accusations commonly made against scholars like al-Bājūrī, by Salafis and others, that their scholarship is pedantic and obfuscating. In contrast, Jumʿa describes al-Bājūrī as a teacher who makes Islamic knowledge simple and accessible to common folk. The article shows that this description of al-Bājūrī as a scholar who simplifies knowledge mirrors Jumʿa’s own approach to taḥqīq, which he represents as a practice of taysīr, facilitating comprehension of the text for Muslim students. From this vantage point, Jumʿa’s edition constructs and shapes the intellectual lineage and scholarly methodology that he claims to represent.
The article begins with a brief presentation of Jumʿa’s biography and work as editor and then analyzes his approach to taḥqīq in the edition, demonstrating its anti-Salafi orientation and his pedagogical conception of taḥqīq as taysīr. The final section of the article connects Jumʿa’s work as editor to his larger goal of revitalizing the image of al-Azhar and its scholars (hereafter: ʿulamāʾ) in the context of challenges to their role and authority in the twentieth century.9 The conclusion discusses the connection between Jumʿa’s taḥqīq and his support for the Egyptian military state during and after the 2013 coup.
ʿAlī Jumʿa as Editor
ʿAlī Jumʿa was born in 1952 in Beni Suef in Upper Egypt. Unlike most prominent Muslim scholars associated with al-Azhar, his education did not begin at al-Azhar but rather in the government schools, and he received his bachelor’s degree in commerce from Ain Shams University in 1973. After graduating, he formally devoted himself to studying the Islamic sciences at al-Azhar, although he had begun studying the Qurʾān, hadith, and Islamic jurisprudence informally during high school and college. He then enrolled in al-Azhar’s Faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies, obtaining his undergraduate degree in 1979. In 1985, he completed a master’s degree in Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) from al-Azhar’s Faculty of Sharīʿa and Law and then a doctoral degree from the same faculty in 1988. He was promoted to assistant professor in the Faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies at al-Azhar and eventually to full professor. In addition to his university studies, Jumʿa received numerous licenses (ijāzāt) from ʿulamāʾ in fields such as Sufism, jurisprudence, hadith, legal theory, and the Arabic sciences. After becoming grand mufti in 2003, he played a prominent role in defining “official” Islam for Egyptian and Muslim publics and emphasizing the indispensability of al-Azhar and its ʿulamāʾ as part of this task.10 He has served in other high status roles, such as member of al-Azhar’s Supreme Council of Religious Scholars (hayʾat kibār al-ʿulamāʾ) since it was reinstituted in 2012 and as a member of al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Council (majmaʿ al-buḥūth al-islāmiyya) since 2004.11 Although during his tenure as mufti, Jumʿa was considered relatively “liberal” and “progressive,” during the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the 2013 coup he became infamous for his support of authoritarianism and for his statements inciting violence against Muslim Brotherhood protestors.12 Jumʿa’s statements and fatāwā during the political events of 2011 and 2013 have received significant attention in scholarship on contemporary Islam, overshadowing his intellectual projects, although, as others have argued—and as this article will also demonstrate—his approach to Islamic knowledge, including his work as editor, sheds light on his political positions and endeavors.13
Much of Jumʿa’s work as editor occurred in the formative decade when he was building his career and scholarly credentials before becoming mufti in 2003. On Jumʿa’s website, he lists twenty-nine titles under the category of editing and review (taḥqīq wa-murājaʿa). Below are editions that he mentions on his website and that I was able to obtain in hard copy or electronically. The titles are organized chronologically by their date of publication:
Zakariyyā al-Nawawī (d. 1277), Riyāḍ al-ṣāliḥīn min kalām Sayyid al- Mursalīn (Cairo: Dār al-Kitāb al-Miṣrī, 1991).
Ibn Nujaym (d. 1562/3), Rasāʾil Ibn Nujaym al-iqtiṣādiyya, (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 1998/1999). Edited under the auspices of Markaz al-Dirāsāt al-Fiqhiyya wa-l-Iqtiṣādiyya. Co-edited with Muḥammad Aḥmad Sirāj.
Muḥammad Ḥasanayn b. Muḥammad Makhlūf al-ʿAdawī (d. 1878), al-Muqāranāt al-tashrīʿiyya: taṭbīq al-qānūn al-madanī wa-l-jināʾī ʿalā madhhab al-Imām Mālik (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 1999). With the sharḥ by Makhlūf al-Minyāwī. Co-edited with Muḥammad Aḥmad Sirāj.
Aḥmad b. Naṣr al-Dāwūdī (d. 1011 or 1012), Kitāb al-Amwāl (Giza: Markaz al-Dirāsāt al-Fiqhiyya wa-l-Iqtiṣādiyya, 2000). Edited under the auspices of Markaz al-Dirāsāt al-Fiqhīyya wa-al-Iqtiṣādiyya. Co-edited with Muḥammad Aḥmad Sirāj.
Aḥmad b. Idrīs al-Qarāfī (d. 1285), Kitāb al-furūq: anwār al-burūq fī anwāʿ al-furūq (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2001). Edited under the auspices of Markaz al-Dirāsāt al-Fiqhiyya wa-al-Iqtiṣādiyya. Co-edited with Muḥammad Aḥmad Sirāj.
Sayyid ʿAbdallāh ʿAlī Ḥusayn al-Taydī (d. 1979), al-Muqāranāt al-tashrīʿiyya bayn al-qawānīn al-waḍiʿiyya al-madaniyya wa-l-tashrīʿāt al-islāmiyya (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2001).
Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860), Ḥāshiyat al-Imām al-Bājūrī ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2002).
Maḥmūd b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Aṣbahānī (d. 1348/9), Bayān al-Mukhtaṣar: wa-huwa sharḥ Mukhtaṣar Ibn al-Ḥājib fī uṣūl al-fiqh (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2004).
Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Qadūrī (d. 1037), al-Mawsūʿa al-fiqhiyya al- muqārana: al-musammā al-Tajrīd (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2004). Edited under the auspices of Markaz al-Dirāsāt al-Fiqhiyya wa-al-Iqtiṣādiyya. Co-edited with Muḥammad Aḥmad Sirāj.
Muḥammad Qadrī Pasha (d. 1886), al-Aḥkām al-sharʿiyya fī al-aḥwāl al-shakhṣiyya ʿalā madhhab Abī Ḥanīfa al-Nuʿmān (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2006). Includes the sharḥ by Muḥammad Zayd al-Ibyānī. Edited under the auspices of Markaz al-Dirāsāt al-Fiqhiyya wa-al-Iqtiṣādiyya. Co-edited with Muḥammad Aḥmad Sirāj.
Muḥammad Qadrī Pasha (d. 1886), Kitāb qānūn al-ʿadl wa-l-inṣāf li-l-qaḍāʾ ʿalā mushkilāt al-awqāf (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2006). Edited under the auspices of Markaz al-Dirāsāt al-Fiqhiyya wa-al-Iqtiṣādiyya. Co-edited with Muḥammad Aḥmad Sirāj.
Of these eleven texts, the 2002 edition of al-Bājūrī’s Tuḥfat al-murīd is the only one that does not relate to Islamic law, which is Jumʿa’s field of specialty; rather, the focus of the text is Ashʿarī theology.
Al-Bājūrī is an important figure for Jumʿa, evident in the fact that in his writings, Jumʿa puts al-Bājūrī’s death date as the end point of the continuous paradigm of Islamic knowledge, which he refers to as al-turāth al-islāmī, that began in the time of al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ. For Jumʿa, al-Bājūrī’s approach to Islamic knowledge represents the authentic Islamic tradition as it existed before Westernization, colonialism, and the proliferation of “extremist” tendencies, a broad category that he uses to refer to Salafis and Islamists.14 Al-Bājūrī’s scholarship followed the normative path of Sunni Muslim scholars, which meant that he taught and produced jurisprudence within a madhhab, theology according to the Ashʿarī or Māturīdī schools, and embraced the rational sciences and Sufism. Most of al-Bājūrī’s twenty completed works were in topics such as Ashʿarī creed, Shāfiʿī jurisprudence, syllogistic logic, and the linguistic sciences, and most were shurūḥ or ḥawāshī, or commentaries on the works of scholars who had died centuries earlier. Evident in this abundance of commentaries, al-Bājūrī’s scholarly production interpreted the teachings that he inherited from his teachers before him, continuing and preserving the norms, debates, and agreements that constituted normative Sunni teachings in this era. As intellectual historian of Islam Aaron Spevack avers in his monograph on al-Bājūrī, “he did not break any molds, nor did he call for reformation and change.”15 Instead, he preserved and transmitted Islamic knowledge according to the established methods of his teachers.
Tuḥfat al-murīd, completed in 1234/1818, is al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya on al-Laqānī’s versified matn that summarizes the basic creed of Sunni Islam according to later Ashʿarīs. In the text, al-Bājūrī treats issues related to creed, God’s attributes, prophecy, reason, taqlīd, destiny and predestination, Sufism, and other topics. He meticulously analyzes each word of the matn, explaining how it should be vocalized, and he mentions opinions and debates amongst scholars and schools of thought on issues of grammar, rhetoric, speculative theology, logic, and jurisprudence. While much of the ḥāshiya summarizes the opinions of other scholars, he indicates his own views throughout the text.
The ḥāshiya was reprinted numerous times between the mid-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Below is a sample of the editions of Tuḥfat al-murīd published from the mid-nineteenth century until 2002, when Jumʿa published his own edition. The list below includes editions that I could obtain as either digital or hardcopy. They are organized roughly in the order they were published.16
Cairo: Dār al-Ṭibāʿa al-Kastaliyya, 1278 [1863]. Corrected by Muḥammad al-Rīḥāwī and Masʿūd al-Nābulsī al-Fāḍil.
Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Khayriyya, 1304 [1887]. No editor or corrector is mentioned.
Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya, 1929. Corrected by a council (lajna).
Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī wa-Awlādihi bi-Miṣr, 1385 [1939]. Saʿd ʿAlī is mentioned as head of correction.
Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya, n.d. Corrected by a council (lajna). This edition appears to be a reprint of #3. Although there is no date of publication, most likely it was republished in 1960s given the advertisements included in the back of the edition.
Cairo: Yuṭlabu min al-Maktaba al-Tijāriyya al-Kubrā, n.d. No editor or corrector is mentioned.
Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Istiqāma, n.d. No editor or corrector is mentioned.
Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Muḥammad ʿAlī Subayḥ wa-Awlādihi, 1954. Corrected and footnoted (taʿlīq) by ‘Abd al-Raḥīm al-Makkī.
Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1983. No editor or corrector is mentioned.
Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Azhariyya li-l-Turāth, ed. Lajnat Taḥqīq al-Turāth, 2002.
Cairo: Dār al-Salām, ed. ʿAlī Jumʿa, 2002.
Most of these printings are not taḥqīq editions; instead, they can more accurately be described as maṭbūʿāt, or printings that were a product of the work of the muṣaḥḥiḥ, or corrector. Taṣḥīḥ, or correction, was the dominant mode of text-editing for print until the early to mid-twentieth century in Egypt and much of the Arab world. Built on existing manuscript practices, taṣḥīḥ included the tasks of proofreading the handwritten script that the printed page would be based on and then proofreading the printed pages themselves. Taṣḥīḥ did not involve critical analysis of manuscript variants to produce an authoritative copy, as did the mode of text-editing that taḥqīq would eventually describe.17 Although Jumʿa’s 2002 edition contains many of the features of a twentieth-century taḥqīq edition, such as the inclusion of an editor’s introduction, the use of punctuation and paragraphing, and the incorporation of indexes, taḥqīq in Jumʿa’s edition is unlike that which was practiced in the early twentieth century by editors such as Aḥmad Zakī (1867–1934) and Aḥmad Taymūr (1871–1930).18 For instance, Jumʿa does not mention manuscript sources at all in his introduction to the edition. This reflects the fact that in 2002 al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya was not a forgotten text that needed to be resurrected from manuscript fragments; instead, it was widely available in print and circulating in 2002, as it had been for more than a century. Given this context, what led Jumʿa to produce the new edition, and what did the practice of taḥqīq entail in his edition?
The following analysis demonstrates that in the 2002 edition, Jumʿa’s taḥqīq involved selecting the text, framing its significance in the introduction and footnotes, and facilitating (taysīr) the text to make it comprehensible to contemporary Muslim students. In these interventions, Jumʿa’s taḥqīq appears to have been responding to two contexts, which he refers to both obliquely and directly in the introduction. The first context, implicit but not named in the edition, is the proliferation of Salafi editors in Arabic publishing in the twentieth century, whose efforts to edit and publish texts that supported Salafi thought at times eclipsed Ashʿarī texts that had dominated circles of Islamic education.19 The second context, which is more explicitly identified by Jumʿa in the introduction, is the criticism of al-Azhar, late Sunni Muslim scholars like al-Bājūrī, and the genre of the ḥāshiya that was articulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by diverse individuals and trends, ranging from Salafis to modernist reformers to secular intellectuals. Thus, the article suggests that Jumʿa produced this edition to argue for the importance of al-Azhar and its scholars against their detractors, Salafī and otherwise, specifically for the benefit of Muslim students, in the hopes of persuading them to follow the path of Azharī ʿulamāʾ.
Al-Bājūrī’s Ḥāshiya: The Anti-Salafi Edition
Salafism is a widely debated concept in Islamic studies. Although self-described Salafis understand themselves to be following the path of the earliest Muslims (al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ), recent scholarship demonstrates that Salafism (al-salafiyya) as an ideological typology is of recent vintage. In his influential book, Henri Lauzière distinguishes between the modern category of al-salafiyya (Salafism), the purist Sunni orientation, which emerged in the early twentieth century, and madhhab al-salaf, which, prior to the twentieth century, referred to the doctrine of the early generations of Muslims, including the Companions and the Successors, which Ḥanbalī scholars claimed to follow in their approach to theology.20 Although adherents to purist Salafism often claim to follow madhhab al-salaf in matters of theology, their movement is more complex and multifaceted than this single aspect; instead, they see Salafism as offering a comprehensive approach to Islam covering every aspect of religious experience.21 Regarding the origins of Salafi thought, there are different opinions. Scholarship has connected aspects of the ideas expressed in twentieth-century Salafism, such as the rejection of loyalties to schools of law (madhāhib), rigorist theology, the questioning of popular Sufi practices, and emphasis on hadith, to Islamic revival and reform movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in diverse locations, such as Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and the Indian subcontinent.22 Scholars have also noted the various approaches and political orientations that fall under the twentieth-century typology of Salafism, with some creating new taxonomies to reflect this differentiation.23 Thus, writing about Salafism—both the ideas that it refers to and the concept itself—requires precision. When it comes to Jumʿa’s ḥāshiya, this challenge is compounded, since he does not identify Salafism or any specific scholar as the audience for his edition.24 However, the anti-Salafi orientation of Jumʿa’s choice of text to edit can be understood from the context. Although Salafi thinkers and currents differ in almost all aspects of their thought and practice, one area where they tend to align is in their rejection of Ashʿarism, which they see as a major deviation from the pure creed of the early Muslims (al-salaf). This is because Ashʿarīs resort to sources other than the Qurʾān and Sunna, like Aristotelian logic, to solve theological questions, such as how to understand God’s attributes that suggest anthropomorphism.25 Although Jumʿa does not name Salafis as an intended audience of his edition, his rhetoric and framing of the ḥāshiya in the introduction and footnotes makes this apparent.
In purist Salafi thought in the twentieth century, the primacy of religious doctrine (ʿaqīda) is expressed through the notion of tawḥīd.26 Given the centrality of tawḥīd in Salafi thought it is no coincidence that Jumʿa begins the editor’s introduction to the ḥāshiya with a general statement about ʿilm al-tawḥīd, rather than similar concepts like ʿaqīda (creed) or ʿilm al-kalām (speculative theology). He writes: “Indeed, ʿilm al-tawḥīd is one of the most important sciences that someone should study, for it is a lofty science concerned with the majesty of God’s eternal decree. It deals with the most important issues of humanity on this earth: the issues of divinity (ulūhiyya), prophecy (risāla), and recompense (jazāʾ) on the final day. …”27 In the present era, Jumʿa states, conveying the basics of theology is important for two reasons: First, because God obligated Muslims to spread his message; and second, in the present age, the unbelievers (kuffār) have ascended to world leadership, resulting in multiple kinds of human suffering, therefore making the importance of tawḥīd even clearer.28 By beginning his introduction to the ḥāshiya with a statement about the importance of ʿilm al-tawḥīd, and by then proceeding to present ʿilm al-tawḥīd through a nineteenth-century Ashʿarī ḥāshiya, Jumʿa implicitly situates the ḥāshiya against Salafism’s exclusionary claims to tawḥīd, instead locating it as a concept belonging to later scholars of Sunni Islam like al-Bājūrī.
Jumʿa continues that “generation after generation of ʿulamāʾ al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ have composed works in ʿilm al-tawḥīd to teach the people.” Of these books, Jumʿa has chosen to edit this ḥāshiya because al-Bājūrī “simplifies” (tabsīṭ) theology for the people, and in this way, he undertakes daʿwa in his teaching. The description of al-Bājūrī as one of the ʿulamāʾ al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ (literally: the religious scholars of the pious ancestors) also appears directed at Salafi claims to be the exclusive heirs of the salaf al-ṣāliḥ. By contrast, Jumʿa suggests that al-Bājūrī and other ʿulamāʾ like him, who approach law and theology through madhāhib, which many Salafis reject, are the true inheritors of the traditions of the salaf.29 Furthermore, Jumʿa’s description of al-Bājūrī as a scholar who “simplifies knowledge” is likely directed against Salafi accusations that ʿulamāʾ lead people astray by overcomplicating knowledge.30 Finally, his claim that al-Bājūrī undertakes daʿwa appears to be another implied dig at Salafis, for whom daʿwa is central to their articulation of a particular kind of activism.31
Yet it is not only from invoking and reappropriating the major concepts of late-twentieth-century Salafism that Jumʿa’s ḥāshiya derives its anti-Salafi character. It is also by signaling his agreement with the content of the ḥāshiya, first by selecting the text to edit, and then by framing its importance, that this orientation is conveyed. Jumʿa’s alignment with the content of the ḥāshiya is evidenced in the sections that deal with points of disagreement between Salafi theology and Ashʿarism, such as how to understand parts of the Qurʾān and hadith that suggest God’s anthropomorphism. Most Salafi groups follow the doctrinal works of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), who were themselves followers of the Ḥanbalī theological school. Scholarly arguments about God’s divine attributes are too complex to elucidate here in all their nuance but, put simply, Ibn Taymiyya and the Ḥanbalī theological school argue for a literalist understanding of God’s attributes without assigning modality (bi-lā kayf), whereas the Ashʿarī and Māturīdī schools understand passages that describe God’s attributes in ways that suggest anthropomorphism by applying hermeneutical strategies, such as taʾwīl (metaphorical interpretation) and tafwīḍ (entrusting the actual intended meaning of a word to God), to align the literal text of the Qurʾān with larger Qurʾanic principles, such as tanzīh, or God’s transcendence.
The issue of God’s attributes and how to understand them arises, for instance, in Jumʿa’s edition when al-Bājūrī analyzes the following line from al-Laqānī’s matn: “And every primary text (naṣṣ) that gives the erroneous impression of anthropomorphism, metaphorically interpret it or entrust its actual meaning …”32 In al-Bājūrī’s discussion of this line, he mentions key Ashʿarī concepts that support the hermeneutical strategies of taʾwīl and tafwīḍ that al-Laqānī describes.33 At the end of this section of the ḥāshiya, Jumʿa provides a two-paragraph footnote where he summarizes what he sees as the most important points of the passage. He states that when Muslims read Qurʾanic passages that describe God in ways that suggest anthropomorphism (tashbīh) or corporealism (tajsīd), they must understand that there is a difference between the Creator and creation. In the Arabic language, Jumʿa explains, there is polysemy (al-mushtarak al-lafẓī), the idea that one word can have many meanings. While the word itself is the same, it refers to different realities. Nothing is greater than the difference between the essence (dhāt) of God and the essence of His creation. Thus, we cannot understand the meaning, for instance, of the Qurʾanic passage that describes God sitting on the throne because God is above human understanding. On the one hand, we must affirm (nuthbit lahu) that God is sitting on the throne, but on the other hand, this sitting is unlike the sitting of creation; we cannot know its reality. Similarly, Muslims affirm God’s hand (yad), since it is mentioned in the Qurʾān, but they must know that God’s hand is unlike a human hand. In this footnote, Jumʿa avoids discussing the technical concepts and debates that al-Bājūrī invokes in his discussion in the ḥāshiya, instead boiling down the Ashʿarī understanding of God’s qualities to principles that most Sunni Muslims, contemporary Salafis and Ashʿarīs alike, would agree on, i.e., that God’s attributes are beyond human understanding. Jumʿa does not mention, for instance, concepts that are specific to Ashʿarism and to al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya, such as al-Bājūrī’s concept of taʾwīl tafṣīlī.34 Nor does Jumʿa get into debates about the concept of tafwīḍ.35 Instead, his summary conveys the basics of Ashʿarī thought in a simple and uncontroversial manner.
In the second paragraph of the footnote, Jumʿa moves to a more defensive position. He writes: “Reasonable people of the umma must prohibit disagreement and conflict over this approach that preserves the sanctity of the primary text (al-naṣṣ), respects its utterances, purifies the Lord of His servants from whatever tashbīh and tajsīm occurs in the minds of foolish people, and safeguards against spreading rumors about God without knowledge.” Although Jumʿa does not name Salafi scholars specifically, they are implied as those who create conflict over the Ashʿarī approach. He then quotes from Qurʾān 17:36: “And pursue not that thou has no knowledge of; the hearing, the sight, the heart—all of those shall be questioned of.”36 He avers that Muslims should not strive to understand what God has not permitted them to understand. Refraining from explaining challenging utterances is not ignorance; rather, the essence of knowledge is refraining from something that God wants us to refrain from.37
Jumʿa’s footnotes reveal several important aspects of his practice of taḥqīq. First, Jumʿa’s intended audience for the edition does not appear to be exclusively scholarly, evident in the fact that in the aforementioned footnote he expresses al-Bājūrī’s ideas in the most general and basic terms. He does not dive into the technical arguments that in fact characterize Salafi-Ashʿarī disagreements, although al-Bājūrī’s discussion of al-Laqānī’s matn is very technical. Second, and related to the first, Jumʿa seems to direct his edition at the general Muslim public, specifically those who might be swayed by Salafi criticisms of Ashʿarism. Thus, at times his tone is defensive, even though he does not substantively engage with Salafi theological arguments.38 Third, in the footnotes, Jumʿa’s effort to win over the general Muslim public is not waged through a deeper explanation of Ashʿarī hermeneutical strategies; rather, he provides a basic and reductive summary of the complex question of how Ashʿarīs approach passages of the Qurʾān and hadith that suggest anthropomorphism, thereby supporting his characterization of Ashʿarī theology as simple.
Jumʿa’s attention to hadith in his edition also demonstrates how he situates the ḥāshiya to respond to Salafī thought. A renewed focus on hadith was a common characteristic of Muslim reform and revival movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it continues to be a characteristic aspect of the thought of late-twentieth-century Salafi scholars, such as Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī, (d. 1999).39 To cure contemporary ills, al-Albānī and others promoted the study of hadith, and specifically the critical spirit of hadith studies, such as by rejecting the use of weak hadiths in any manner and reviving the genre of technical terminology and rules of hadith criticism (muṣtalaḥ al-hadith).40 A focus on hadith is evident in Jumʿa’s edition. For instance, in the footnotes, he often includes the whole text (matn) of a hadith that al-Bājūrī only alludes to in part, and for each hadith mentioned, he identifies which collection it comes from, who related it, and, in most cases, how scholars have categorized its isnād. By way of example, in the ḥāshiya al-Bājūrī mentions the hadith, “A prophet only prophesizes at the beginning of forty years,” although he makes the caveat that ʿulamāʾ do not cite this hadith as evidence because Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201) determined that the hadith had been fabricated (mawḍūʿ); instead, scholars cite the continuous custom. In his footnote on the hadith, Jumʿa mentions that Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201) considers this hadith to have been fabricated and that other scholars, such as Shams al-Dīn al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497), Ismāʿīl b. Muḥammad al-‘Ajlūnī al-Jarrāḥī (d. 1162/1749) and Mullā ʿAlī al-Qāriʾ (d. 1014/1606), agree with this categorization. However, Jumʿa mentions too that al-Suyūṭī transmits the hadith and is silent as to its categorization (sakata ʿalayhi).41 After relaying this information, Jumʿa does not give his own opinion about the hadith or the fact that al-Bājūrī includes it in the ḥāshiya. Instead, he opts for an air of impartiality, laying out the different views on the hadith without comment.
Yet, sometimes, by not stating an opinion, Jumʿa implicitly signals his approval for one position over another. This is apparent, for instance, in his treatment of al-Bājūrī’s use of weak hadiths in the ḥāshiya. Weak hadiths are a particular point of contention for late-twentieth-century Salafi scholars, like al-Albānī, who was categorically opposed to using weak hadiths in religious discourse, particularly in matters pertaining to law and creed. In contrast to this position, in the ḥāshiya al-Bājūrī articulates what Jonathan Brown calls a “baroque” position, asserting that Muslims can derive information about God’s attributes from weak hadiths provided that these hadiths do not affect belief about God but only influence their acts.42 In Jumʿa’s presentation of this section of the ḥāshiya, he allows al-Bājūrī’s words to speak for themselves, expressing neither agreement or disagreement with al-Bājūrī’s use of the weak hadith.43 Elsewhere in the text where al-Bājūrī cites a weak hadith, Jumʿa provides references to the collection it comes from, its categorization, and the range of opinions as to its categorization; however, he does not give his own opinion.44 Yet his silence on al-Bājūrī’s use of weak hadiths implicitly signals his agreement with this usage, or at least that he does not see the use of weak hadith to be a problem.
Thus, although in the editorial spaces of the ḥāshiya Jumʿa does not engage in overt polemics with Salafi scholars, by selecting this text to edit, framing its importance in the introduction, and engaging with the text in the footnotes, Jumʿa’s anti-Salafi stance as editor becomes apparent. The following section demonstrates that as editor, Jumʿa is engaged in another ideological project, which is recasting and idealizing the image of scholars like al-Bājūrī as teachers who simplify knowledge for the people. As the following demonstrates, Jumʿa’s representation of al-Bājūrī as a teacher who simplifies knowledge mirrors his own approach to editing as a practice of taysīr.
The Didactic Edition: Editing as Taysīr
In the edition, Jumʿa presents al-Bājūrī as a scholar who made Islamic knowledge simple and accessible to common folk. Jumʿa explains in the introduction that he chose this text from among the many that the ʿulamāʾ al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ have written “to teach the people” (tuʿallim al-nās) these issues in the “best way and most succinct method.” He adds that al-Bājūrī’s approach is methodological in that he follows rules and principles and that he references poetry and verse that is “light,” “easy,” and therefore easily memorized.45 Jumʿa asserts that in writing in such an accessible manner, al-Bājūrī was following his teacher, Muḥammad al-Faḍālī (d. 1236/1821). He states: “Inasmuch as al-Bājūrī follows the customary approach (sunna) of his shaykh al-Faḍālī in terms of simplifying knowledge (tabsīṭ al-ʿilm) for the people, and of observing the aspect of daʿwa in the lesson, we see that his expression is easy and simple …”46 To give a sense of al-Faḍālī and his pedagogy, Jumʿa narrates an anecdote about his commute from Giza to al-Azhar. On this journey, al-Faḍālī rode a donkey, and on the way, he lectured the donkey driver on theological issues. According to Jumʿa, it was only a short time until “these people and this social class could speak about these [theological] issues with understanding and awareness.” Jumʿa explains that the anecdote first demonstrates that in the early nineteenth century, Muslim civilization had not died, evident in al-Faḍālī’s connection to the common folk. Second, it clarifies that the ʿulamāʾ addressed people according to their intellectual abilities in their teaching and daʿwa. He writes: “Verily [this story] refutes the claim [that the ʿulamāʾ of this era] spoke in riddles (alghāz) and engaged in stubborn disputation (al-tamaḥḥuk al-lafẓī), although these [practices] had their role, place, and specialized audience. It makes us critically examine many established characteristics of this era and the time before it ...” Here Jumʿa suggests that the anecdote about al-Faḍālī calls for revising the assumed characteristics that have come to be associated with the early nineteenth century and the centuries prior. These assumptions, he suggests, came from people who “quickly passed judgement” on the ʿulamāʾ, even though they had “dedicated their lives to the protection of Islam and to its transmission according to the requirements of their age and their abilities, and in the spirit of causing the least amount of harm.” Jumʿa ends the paragraph in the following way: “Indeed, if there is anything that [the ʿulamāʾ] can be blamed for, it is a result of their humanity (al-bashariyya), from which no age or person can escape.”47
Notably, al-Bājūrī himself does not represent the aim of the ḥāshiya as teaching the common people. In the introduction to the ḥāshiya, he writes: “A delegation of brothers asked me … to write a ḥāshiya [on al-Laqānī’s matn] to reveal what is hidden within in terms of allusions and secrets ...”48 Al-Bājūrī evidently sees his role as one of shedding light on otherwise obfuscated treasures; he represents the ḥāshiya as an act of revealing. Yet he does not specify doing so for the common folk. In addition, it seems pertinent to note that the description of al-Bājūrī’s method as succinct and easy, as Jumʿa alleges, is not self-evident. The 2002 edition of the ḥāshiya is four hundred and seven pages long, and its content includes references to extensive and sometimes esoteric debates in speculative theology, grammar, law, Qurʾanic exegesis, and other subjects. It seems unlikely that the audience for the text was common folk with little or no background on the issues that al-Bājūrī discusses. Instead, the ḥāshiya was meant for more advanced students at al-Azhar or similar teaching mosques, i.e., those with specialized knowledge in the Islamic sciences. Indeed, one of the aspects of al-Bājūrī’s intellectual method that Spevack and others writing on late Sunni Islam have emphasized is its resistance to oversimplification and monolithic analysis; instead, works from this era tended to prioritize complexity, recognizing an accepted range of consensus on an issue as well as scholarly disagreement in each science.49 This prioritization is on display in al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya. On matters related to theology, law, and grammar, al-Bājūrī prioritizes representing the diversity of opinions, rather than one “correct” opinion.
Jumʿa’s representation of al-Bājūrī and al-Faḍālī as teachers who make Islamic knowledge accessible mirrors the pedagogical role that he sets out for himself as editor. In the introduction, Jumʿa explains that he has chosen to “edit” this ḥāshiya not by using the word taḥqīq, but with the phrase li-qirāʾatihi wa-l-taʿlīq ʿalayhi, literally to “read and write notes on it.” The word qirāʾa conveys the double sense of private reading, a standard use of a printed text, and of receiving orally and reciting, a practice that relates to the paradigm of the Qurʾān as a recitation-text.50 By using qirāʾa to describe his work as editor, Jumʿa locates his taḥqīq within the oral-written dialectic that has been part of knowledge transmission in Muslim contexts for centuries.51 The implication is that he arrived at his ability to authoritatively edit the text not by having read it alone, but through person-to-person transmission, where the oral and written are comingled. Jumʿa emphasizes his authority in “reading” the ḥāshiya by listing the chains of transmission that connect him to al-Bājūrī. The section, which comes after the introduction, is titled, “My sanad in reading (qirāʾa) the book Jawharat al-tawḥīd.”52 The four asānīd that he cites are the following:53
1) Abū al-Faḍl ʿAbd Allāh b. Sayyidī Muḥammad b. al-Ṣiddīq al-Ghumārī al-Ḥusnī (d. 1993) > Muḥammad Dūwīdār al-Tilāwī al-Kafrāwī (d. 1942) > al-Bājūrī;
2) Muḥammad Zakī al-Dīn Ibrāhīm (d. 1998) > Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh b. Ibrāhīm al-ʿĀqūrī al-ʿArabī al-Lībī (d. 1970) > al-Bājūrī;
3) Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Tījānī (d. 1978) > al-ʿĀqūrī > al-Bājūrī;
4) Muḥammad ʿAlawī al-Mālikī al-Makkī (d. 2004) > al-ʿAqūrī > al-Bājūrī;
Jumʿa’s inclusion of these asānīd in the edition has two functions. First, it establishes his scholarly credentials, particularly against those whose reading would theoretically not have a sanad, i.e., Salafi scholars.54 Scholars like Jumʿa often claim that they, unlike Salafi scholars, receive knowledge through an isnād. Second, Jumʿa’s asānīd locate the role of the modern editor (muḥaqqiq) within the isnād paradigm of Islamic knowledge transmission. The implication is that contemporary taḥqīq, as practiced by Jumʿa, is a seamless continuation of the ʿulamāʾ’s practices of knowledge transmission. This view is evident elsewhere in Jumʿa’s written corpus.55 Thus, in giving authority to his own practice of taḥqīq, Jumʿa foregrounds continuity between the ʿulamāʾ’s pre-print and print practices, thereby locating the technology of print and the practice of editing as undertaken by Jumʿa as a continuation of the isnād paradigm.
Emphasizing his didactic aims as editor, Jumʿa writes that he has “read the book and taught it many times” and that his interest in editing is to “facilitate” or “ease” (taysīr) the text for the reader, a task that he sought to accomplish in several ways. For instance, he added punctuation marks “that help in the understanding of the text,” while he also disambiguated issues of grammar, syntax, and language to the extent possible by adding vowels. In addition, he attributed Qurʾanic verses, analyzed hadiths and their rulings, discussed references to poetry and verse, explained unusual vocabulary, and created indexes. He adds that he included footnotes in places in the text that revealed the intention of the compiler (i.e., al-Bājūrī), which would benefit the student, teaching them how to understand “books of turāth and its principles.”56 In these remarks, Jumʿa frames al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya as a template for how to read turāth more generally, while he suggests that his role as muḥaqqiq is pedagogical; he has edited the text in such a way as to make it understandable and accessible to “the people,” following the path of al-Bājūrī and al-Faḍālī in teaching and scholarship. In undertaking taḥqīq of this text, Jumʿa is teaching Muslim students how to understand turāth.
Jumʿa’s pedagogical approach to taḥqīq is evident throughout the 2002 edition. For instance, he opens the section titled “The Biography of al-Imām al-Bājūrī,” in the following way: “He is: Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī …” Jumʿa adds a footnote after the phrase Burhān al-Dīn, where he explains: “It is said al-Burhān, but the alif and lām are replaced by the muḍāf ilayhi [the second noun of a genitive construction]. i.e., Burhān al-Dīn. This is like Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, i.e., Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, and al-Kamāl b. al-Humam, i.e., Kamāl al-Dīn … and so on. The nickname (laqab) of al-Burhān was popular among the later scholars (al-mutaʾakhkhirīn) for those named Ibrāhīm, just as Nūr al-Dīn was popular for someone named ʿAlī, al-Shams for someone named Muḥammad … etc.”57 Jumʿa’s tone in this footnote is that of a teacher offering a lesson on naming conventions among the later scholars of Sunni Islam. He uses this lesson also as an opportunity to explain a basic grammar concept (the relationship between alif lām and the muḍāf ilayhi). As editor, Jumʿa approaches his task of taysīr not just by providing references that al-Bājūrī alludes to in the text but by teaching contemporary Muslim students how to read and make sense of this kind of text.
Jumʿa’s pedagogical approach is evident elsewhere in the edition, too. For instance, Jumʿa puts al-Laqānī’s matn as a standalone text before the ḥāshiya, with the lines of the matn numbered (1–144) and corresponding to numbered sections of the ḥāshiya (1–898). He divides and titles the sections of the ḥāshiya, allowing the reader to easily peruse the text and locate where al-Bājūrī deals with a specific topic. Numbering the lines of the matn and ḥāshiya together enables the student to move back and forth easily between the two texts for purposes of study or research. Throughout the edition, Jumʿa’s footnotes provide relevant background information, such as the names of scholars mentioned, along with reference works in which a student can find more information about the life and works of the scholar.58 He uses the footnotes to gloss words or terms that might be unfamiliar to students (e.g., al-ajdham), not only providing a definition (in this case, al-aqṭa‘) but also how it would be used in a sentence, its maṣdar (verbal noun), and where it exists in foundational sources like the Qurʾān. Similarly, his footnotes define technical terminology.59 Mirroring the content of al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya, in the footnotes Jumʿa mentions differences of opinion on various topics, such as on the legal rulings that al-Bājūrī references.60 He also uses the footnotes to explain the meanings of legal rulings (e.g., the difference between khilāf al-awlā, i.e., against what is better, and makrūh, i.e., reprehensible),61 points of grammar (e.g., bāʾ al-istiʿāna), often with further references,62 and descriptions of the different schools of grammar.63 From this vantage point, we see that Jumʿa’s characterization of al-Bājūrī and al-Faḍālī as scholars who make Islamic knowledge simple and accessible to common folk mirrors how Jumʿa undertakes his own role as editor: he sees taḥqīq as a project of facilitating the text in the sense of making it comprehensible to contemporary Muslim students, to whom the vocabulary, references, and terminology of al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya are most likely unfamiliar.
Jumʿa’s representation of scholars like al-Bājūrī as making knowledge accessible and simple contradicts much of what was said against the ʿulamāʾ in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a host of actors from diverse schools of thought, including Salafi scholars, but also modernist reformers, and more secular-leaning intellectuals.64 Indeed, the approach to knowledge reflected in al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya—a genre often associated with postclassical scholasticism—tends to be accused of being hair-splitting, derivative, pedantic, and obfuscating rather than facilitating understanding and clarity. Thus, Jumʿa’s narrative stands in opposition to other, well-established narratives, suggesting that an aspect of his work as editor is an effort to recast—and indeed, idealize—the image of the ʿulamāʾ and their modes of scholarship not just against Salafi scholars, but more broadly against criticisms of their scholarly methodology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jonathan Brown observes that in response to such the challenges posed to the ʿulamāʾ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not only by rival theological orientations, such as Salafism, but also more broadly by new systems of schooling and the related rise of the lay Muslim intellectual in the twentieth century, ʿulamāʾ like Jumʿa have tended to emphasize their own indispensability.65 The following section offers precision on the form and narrative that this emphasis takes, demonstrating that in his editor’s introduction Jumʿa characterizes the ʿulamāʾ and the postclassical mode of scholarship of the ḥāshiya as the bridge that connects later Muslims to the Arabic language, and through it, to the early Muslim community.
The Ḥāshiya: Preserving the Arabic Language
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ḥāshiya was the subject of vehement critique by diverse social and religious actors. In Orientalist scholarship, ḥawāshī were “routinely depicted as unoriginal, slavish repetition of earlier authorities,”66 and Muslim reformers saw the genre as both symptom and cause of the intellectual decline of the Muslim world.67 Thus, Jumʿa’s interpretation of the history of the ḥāshiya and his defense of the ḥāshiya as an essential aspect of Muslim pedagogical practice aims to defend the genre and its practitioners from centuries of misunderstanding and abuse.
In the editor’s introduction, Jumʿa writes that the ḥāshiya emerged “gradually in the form of research into utterance” (al-baḥth fī al-lafẓ), suggesting that the early ḥāshiya sought to explain the language of a text, and as such, it was mainly concerned with clarification. He writes that the genre of the ḥāshiya (but not the actual term ḥāshiya) began with Abū Zakariyyā al-Nawawī’s (d. 1277) Minhāj al-ṭālibīn in the field of Shāfiʿī jurisprudence.68 Al-Nawawī was one of the highest authorities in the Shāfiʿī school of law, and notably his Minhāj al-ṭālibīn is not usually described as a ḥāshiya. Thus, Jumʿa’s assertation that the history of the ḥāshiya begins with al-Nawawī appears strategic, locating the authority of the textual practice of the ḥāshiya itself in relation to one of the earliest authorities of the Shāfiʿī school, rather than as a product of the later centuries of Muslim scholarship. Jumʿa enters more conventional territory when he asserts that the word ḥāshiya emerged with the Timurid scholar al-Saʿd al-Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390), who wrote a ḥāshiya in the field of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) on al-Ījī’s (d. 1355) commentary (sharḥ) al-ʿAḍud on Ibn Ḥājib’s Mukhtaṣar al-muntahā. He also mentions al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 816/1413), who wrote a ḥāshiya on the same text. Jumʿa then skips ahead almost four centuries to the less well-known Sulaymān al-Jamal (d. 1204/1790), who was an Azharī Shāfiʿī Egyptian shaykh who wrote ḥawāshī on many works, including on those by al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505), such as his Tafsīr al-Jalālayn.69 Jumʿa describes Shaykh al-Jamal’s work as leading to the last phase of the commentary tradition, which, according to Jumʿa, started when al-Jamal died at the end of the eighteenth century and ended with the death of Shaykh Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī (d. 1935), who wrote a supercommentary on al-Asnawī’s (d. 1370) commentary on al-Bayḍāwī’s (d. c. 1316) Minhāj al-uṣūl.
After providing this genealogy of the ḥāshiya, Jumʿa gives his rationale for the development of the commentary tradition in the first place. He asserts that in the period between al-Shāfiʿī and al-Nawawī, there was no concern that people would not understand the writings of the scholars since in the first five centuries of Islam, people were closer to the Arabic language and knew it better. As such, before al-Nawawī’s time, commentaries—with their aim of explaining a text—were not necessary. However, after the Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258, they burned the books and killed the scholars. These circumstances, which took place during al-Nawawī’s lifetime, necessitated the development of the ḥāshiya since it aimed to explicate, transmit, and preserve the teachings of the earlier generations. Then, moving to the sixteenth century, when the Ottomans came to power in Egypt, he asserts that “the aptitude (malaka) for Arabic all but disappeared” since Arabic was not the official language of the state.70 For Jumʿa, these circumstances led to the proliferation of commentaries and of the ḥāshiya in particular, which aimed to explain to present generations the meaning of the earlier texts. From this vantage point, the ḥāshiya is a bulwark against the loss of the Islamic religion at a time when fewer people could understand its foundational texts. Jumʿa represents the ḥāshiya as a social and religious necessity, imperative for the continuation and preservation of the ʿulamāʾ’s writings, which ensure a sound understanding of the revelation. Jumʿa expresses this idea through the concept wājib al-waqt, literally “necessity of the time.” He writes:
I see that the concern of the previous generation (al-sābiqīn) with the commentary (sharḥ)—after the first generation (al-awwalūn) had been concerned with authorship—and then the interest of the later generation (al-lāḥiqīn) with writing supercommentaries (taḥshīya), was all undertaking what was necessary for the time in which they lived. Their aim was to preserve the religion and transmit it to those after them in a way that maintained the aptitude for the Arabic language among the people, which is the beginning of every civilization, awakening (ṣaḥwa), and renaissance (nahḍa).71
Jumʿa’s argument here is that the ʿulamāʾ should not be judged based on the values and aims of the contemporary world; instead, their methods and practices should be understood in the context in which they lived. They did what was necessary to keep Arabic, and through it the revelation, alive amongst the people. The consequences of not doing so—of not authoring commentaries—are evident today when Muslims do not properly understand the revelatory texts. Jumʿa writes:
If we knew that the ḥawāshī were instructive books and not books of daʿwa; that they addressed a specialized audience …; that they were written to ensure the precision of transmission at the highest level; and that they had played a significant role in training students in precise research and understanding utterance … that they [made students] more able to understand the Qurʾanic text and the noble hadith after the skill of Arabic language and linguistic eloquence had gone away; and if we also knew that the lack of interest in utterances (al-alfāẓ) later would put the people today in a state of broken communication and understanding … then we would know that the [existence of] the ḥawāshī was not a feature of backwardness or stagnation in its era. Instead, in every age the ʿulamāʾ must undertake the responsibility of the time, to achieve the aim, which has not changed over the ages … to transmit (naql) and call (daʿwa) people to this religion.72
Jumʿa’s description of the function of the ḥāshiya echoes his characterization of al-Bājūrī and al-Faḍālī, and indeed, of his own work as editor. This genre, the ʿulamāʾ who produced this genre, and his practice of taḥqīq make Arabic, and through it, Islamic knowledge, accessible to contemporary students (here, he does not specify the “people” or the “common folk”). Together, they mitigate the negative effects of “broken communication” and the inability of contemporary Muslims to understand the foundational texts. Without the ʿulamāʾ and their modes of scholarship, Jumʿa suggests, Muslims would have lost their way, straying from the “path” that defines them as Muslim.
Conclusion: Jumʿa’s Taḥqīq and Politics
Jumʿa’s edition expands scholarly understandings of modes of taḥqīq in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than an act of “rediscovery,” as was the case with Arab editors in the early twentieth century, Jumʿa’s taḥqīq is an ideological practice aimed at bolstering the authority and role of Azharī ʿulamāʾ like al-Bājūrī and Jumʿa against Salafi scholars, while in addition, it is a pedagogical practice that facilitates the text in the sense of making it accessible to contemporary Muslim students. The ideological and pedagogical aspects of Jumʿa’s taḥqīq are related; both reflect his interest in asserting the indispensability of the Azhar ʿulamāʾ, thereby bringing the Muslim public under the authoritative guidance of scholars like himself, whose credentials he makes plain in the asānīd that connect him to al-Bājūrī and in the breadth of knowledge with which he “teaches” the text by populating the footnotes.
Although the Azhar-Salafi rivalry has a long history that goes back at least to the early decades of the twentieth century, it intensified after the rise of ISIS in 2014. In this period, the leadership of al-Azhar sought to exclude Salafis from Sunni Islam, as evidenced, for instance, at the Sunni conference held in Grozny, Chechnya in 2016.73 After the 2013 military coup that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood president Muḥammad Mursī, the rhetoric of Azharī official representatives like Jumʿa, who participated in the Egyptian state’s campaign against Islamism, started to blur the lines between Salafis and Islamists, conflating them under the generic and polemical label “extremist” (mutaṭarrif or mutashaddid).74 Azharī scholars like Jumʿa have actively contributed to the anti-Islamism campaign by denigrating Islamists, legitimizing state repression of the Muslim Brotherhood, and representing themselves and al-Azhar as the beacons of “moderate” Islam.75 Although Jumʿa’s edition of al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya precedes the coup by a decade, it can be seen as foreshadowing his later political stances, such as his support for authoritarianism in the 2011 revolution and 2013 coup and his related participation in the denigration of al-Azhar’s Sunni rivals. Mohammed Fadel has argued that Jumʿa’s authoritarian tendencies in these years reflected a Sunni view that social and religious unity, and therefore stability, for the Muslim community can best be ensured through a strong state that works in partnership with an elite cadre of Muslim religious scholars. In the events of the revolution and Egyptian coup Jumʿa supported a strong state that would empower institutional, top-down Islam as represented by al-Azhar and its ʿulamāʾ.76 Jumʿa’s 2002 edition certainly conveys a hierarchical approach to Islamic knowledge and religious authority. His tone as editor is at times paternalistic, and he is keen to make al-Bājūrī and himself seem oriented to the people, especially students seeking knowledge, inviting them to turn to the ʿulamāʾ, not their rivals, to understand Islam. Yet while the post-2013 context gives Jumʿa’s 2002 edition a certain kind of meaning, it would be a mistake to only see the ḥāshiya as a political tool aimed at bolstering Egypt’s military state. As this article has argued, the 2002 edition is also important for providing insight into the strategies that Jumʿa employs, and specifically how he appropriates the concepts, rhetoric, and narratives of Salafi Islam, to make the case for his approach to Islamic knowledge. Analysis of Jumʿa’s edition demonstrates the extent to which Salafism appears to be setting the terms for debate with its “traditionalist” Sunni rivals in the late twentieth century.
Acknowledgements
I thank the reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments. I am especially grateful to Islam Dayeh for providing insightful and constructive guidance. I thank the organizers of the Taḥqīq workshop and editors of the special issue, Simon Conrad and Omar Abdel-Ghaffar, and the workshop participants for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the article. I also thank Khaled El-Rouayheb for his helpful comments on an earlier draft. Funding for this research was provided by the Alwaleed Bin Talal postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and European-Union funded Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oslo.
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Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī, Ḥāshiyat al-Bājūrī ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd al-musammā Tuḥfat al-murīd ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd, ed. ʿAlī Jumʿa (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2002).
The text was likely reprinted so many times because it continued to be taught in madrasa curricula. For instance, in 1956 Tuḥfat al-murīd was one of the texts taught in the subject of theology (tawḥīd) in the fourth and fifth years of Azharī high school. Khuṭṭa wa manhaj al-dirāsa li-l-qism al-thānawī ʿalā al-niẓām alladhī wuḍiʿa li-l-manāhij bi-l-maʿāhid al-dīniyya fī sanat 1375–1956 taḥt taṣdīq al-majlis al-aʿlā li-l-Azhar (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Azhar, 1956), 34–35.
For taḥqīq as a process of “rediscovery,” and for the ways in which the practices subsumed under taḥqīq, such as evaluating manuscript variants against each other, differed from those of taṣḥīḥ, or correction, see Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 81–82, 123–47; and Islam Dayeh, “From Taṣḥīḥ to Taḥqīq: Toward a History of the Arabic Critical Edition,” Philological Encounters 4 (2019), no. 3–4 (2019): 245–99.
This version of Salafism is often characterized by a literal and unmediated reading of the Qurʾān and hadith and a rejection of speculative theology (kalām), Sufism, and adherence to the legal schools (madhāhib). Bernard Haykel, “On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action,” in Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement, ed. Roel Meijer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33–57.
For the history of this rivalry, which pivots around the issues of Sufism, the Ashʿarī and Māturīdī theological schools, and social issues, such as women’s rights and Egypt’s Coptic minority, see Raihan Ismail, “Al‐Azhar and the Salafis in Egypt: Contestation of Two Traditions,” The Muslim World (Hartford) 113, no. 3 (2023): 260–80. This rivalry has taken place primarily at the level of Azharī leadership. Although the institution of al-Azhar does not identify as Salafi, many students and faculty members are Salafi. Masooda Bano, “Protector of the ‘al-Wasatiyya’ Islam: Cairo’s al-Azhar University,” in Shaping Global Islamic Discourses, ed. Keiko Sakurai and Masooda Bano (United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 73–90.
Ahmad Khan, “Islamic Tradition in an Age of Print: Editing, Printing and Publishing the Classical Heritage,” in Reclaiming Islamic Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Kendall and Ahmad Khan (Edinburgh: University Press, 2022), 52–99; and Yūsuf Midrārī, al-Ṣirāʿ ʿalā al-ʿaqīda al-ashʿariyya fī muwājahat al-salafiyya: nihāyat al-qarn 19 wa bidāyat al-qarn 20 (Tangier: Dār al-Iḥyāʾ li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 2022), 93–110. “Late Sunni traditionalist” describes an approach that valorizes the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, the Ashʿarī or Māturīdī schools of theology, and Sufism, and that tends to define itself against reformist trends, namely Salafism, Wahhabism, and Islamism. Jonathan Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), 261–63.
Mustafa Macit Karagözoğlu, “Handling Theology in Footnotes: Salafī Editors on Ḥadīth Commentaries from the Middle Period,” Die Welt des Islams 64, no. 1 (2024): 60–83.
For other scholarship on Salafi editors, see Wasim Shiliwala, “Constructing a Textual Tradition: Salafī Commentaries on al-ʿAqīda al-Ṭaḥāwiyya,” Die Welt des Islams 58, no. 4 (2018): 461–503; and Andrew Hammond, “Salafi Publishing and Contestation over Orthodoxy and Leadership in Sunni Islam,” in Wahhabism and the World: Understanding Saudi Arabia’s Global Influence on Islam, ed. Peter Mandaville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 76–92.
ʿUlamāʾ is a broad category that does not exclude Salafis, and many Salafi thinkers would describe themselves as ʿulamāʾ. In this article, for the sake of clarity I use ʿulamāʾ to refer to those who follow the institutional approach as defined by al-Azhar, not to suggest that Salafis may not have studied at al-Azhar or do not consider themselves to be (or are not considered by others to be) ʿulamāʾ.
Jonathan Brown, “Is Islam Easy to Understand or Not?: Salafis, the Democratization of Interpretation and the Need for the Ulema,” Journal of Islamic Studies 26, no. 2 (2015): 121.
For Jumʿa’s biographical information, see ʿAlī Jumʿa, al-Madkhal ilā dirāsat al-madhāhib al-fiqhiyya, 5th ed. (Cairo: Dar al-Salām, 2016), 457; and his personal website https:// www.draligomaa.com/, accessed June 5, 2024.
David H. Warren, “Cleansing the Nation of the ‘Dogs of Hell’: ʿAlī Jumʿa’s Nationalist Legal Reasoning In Support of the 2013 Egyptian Coup and its Bloody Aftermath,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 3 (2017), 464–5.
Mohammad Fadel, “Islamic Law and Constitution-Making: The Authoritarian Temptation and the Arab Spring,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 53, no. 2 (2016): 472–507.
Mary Elston, “Becoming Turāth: The Islamic Tradition in the Modern Period,” Die Welt des Islams 63, no. 4 (2023): 469–70.
Aaron Spevack, The Archetypal Sunnī Scholar: Law, Theology, and Mysticism in the Synthesis of al-Bājūrī (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 3.
Searches on WorldCat and the Arabic Union Catalogue show four to five times this number of published editions.
Shamsy, Rediscovering, 81–82; Dayeh, “From Taṣḥīḥ to Taḥqīq,” 254–63.
Dayeh, “From Taṣḥīḥ to Taḥqīq,” 269, 289–90.
Midrārī, al-Ṣirāʿ, 5–7. For the Wahhabi editing of Ḥanbalī texts in the late twentieth century, see Nabil Mouline, Clerics of Islam: Religious Authority and Political Power in Saudi Arabia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 43–6.
Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 1–25. Lauzière’s argument has not gone uncontested. For instance, see Frank Griffel, “What Do We Mean By ‘Salafī’? Connecting Muḥammad ʿAbduh with Egypt’s Nūr Party in Islam’s Contemporary Intellectual History,” Die Welt des Islams 55, no. 2 (2015): 186–220.
Lauzière, The Making of Salafism, 23.
John O. Voll, “Foundations of Renewal and Reform: Islamic Movements in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford History of Islam, ed. John Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 509–48.
Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Anatomy of the Salafi Movement,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, no. 3 (2006): 207–39; Joas Wagemakers, Salafism in Jordan: Political Islam in a Quietist Community (New York [NY]: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 51–9.
Elsewhere Jumʿa contests the claim of self-described “Salafis” to be the heirs of the salaf, suggesting that his decision to not name Salafis in the edition—but only to refer to them obliquely—was an intentional choice. He does not want to give them power by recognizing and naming them. ʿAlī Jumʿa, al-Mutashaddidūn: manhajuhum wa-munāqashat ahamm qaḍāyāhum (Abu Dhabi: Dār al-Faqīh li-l-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʿ, 2015), 5–6.
For an excellent discussion of this question as it relates to Salafi thought, see Wagemakers, Salafism in Jordan, 40–42.
Haykel, “On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action,” 38–42.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-murīd, 5.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-murīd, 5.
For Jumʿa‘s description of the ʿulamāʾ as “al-salafī,” see Elston, “Becoming Turāth,” 26–7. For his claim that the later ʿulamāʾ (al-khalaf) are the true heirs of the salaf, whereas those who claim to be Salafis are “extremists,” see Jumʿa, al-Mutashaddidūn, 8–11.
Brown, “Is Islam Easy to Understand or Not?,” 135–44. Brown argues that Salafi anticlerical attitudes should be seen as a rhetorical device seeking to reform, not undo, structures of scholarly authority.
Griffel, What Do We Mean By ‘Salafī’?,” 190.
Al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-murīd, 156. Translated by Spevack, The Archetypal Sunni Scholar, 127.
For instance, in explaining the meaning of the primary text (naṣṣ), i.e., the Qurʾān and Sunna, as being open to taʾwīl, he mentions the Ashʿarī definition of the term ẓāhir as having both a root meaning and a number of possible derived meanings. Spevack, The Archetypal Sunni Scholar, 127–8.
Spevack, The Archetypal Scholar, 129.
Spevack, The Archetypal Scholar, 126–33.
The Koran Interpreted: A Translation, trans. Arthur John Arberry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 306.
Al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 159n1.
In this regard, his approach differs considerably from Salafi editors, who directly argue against Ashʿarī hermeneutical strategies in their footnotes. Karagözoğlu, “Handling Theology in Footnotes,” 60–83. It also differs from other defenders of Ashʿarism in the twentieth century, such as Yūsuf al-Nabhanī (d. 1932) and Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī (d. 1952), who were polemical in their rebuttals and editorial work. See Midrārī, al-Ṣirāʿ, 95–110.
Brown, Hadith, 256–61.
Brown, Hadith, 256–61.
Al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 37n5.
Jonathan Brown, “Even If It’s Not True It’s True: Using Unreliable Hadiths in Sunni Islam,” Islamic Law and Society 18, no. 1 (2011): 47. The mainstream Sunni position for centuries was that weak hadiths could not be used for topics of law or dogma, but they could be used for virtues of actions or exhortatory homiletics. Later Ḥanafīs added that an action could be recommended (mustaḥabb) based on a weak hadith but not required. Some scholars (e.g. al-Suyūṭī) averred that weak hadiths could be used in matters of law when done out of an abundance of caution (i.e., to be more pious). Thus, al-Bājūrī’s position in this instance is exceptional, making Jumʿa’s silence even more noticeable.
Al-Bājūri, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 154.
For instance, see al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 51n2, 54n1, 85n1, and 102n1.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 6.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 6.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 6.
al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 21.
Spevack, The Archetypal Sunni Scholar, 5.
Brinkley Morris Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 22–23.
Messick, The Calligraphic State, 25–26.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 8.
Jumʿa mentions that his reading is also located within a longer chain of transmission, i.e., one that is categorized as “low” (nāzil), and he lists the ʿulamāʾ who constitute this chain of authority.
This is often an exaggerated accusation made against Salafi scholars. Shiliwala shows that in response to such accusations, Salafi scholars often emphasize that they, too, have asānīd that return to the early generations of Muslims. Shiliwala, “Constructing a Textual Tradition,” 466–67.
Jumʿa, al-Madkhal, 17, 22–23.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 6.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 9n2.
For instance, see al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 21n1 and n2.
For instance, see al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 79n2.
For instance, see al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 22n5.
al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 23n3.
al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 24n1.
al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 24n2 and n3.
As Emad Hamdeh writes, “Although Muslim feminists, progressives, secularists, and Salafis are all different, they share an anticlericalist approach to Islamic studies. They view the ʿulamāʾ as backward and as a barrier that prevents the masses from identifying the “true” teachings of Islam.” Salafism and Traditionalism: Scholarly Authority in Modern Islam (Cambridge: University Press, 2021), 3. See also Brown, “Is Islam Easy to Understand or Not?,” 119–22.
Brown, “Is Islam Easy to Understand or Not?,” 121.
Ahmed El Shamsy, “The Ḥāshiya in Islamic Law: A Sketch of the Shāfiʿī Literature,” Oriens 41, no. 3–4 (2013): 301.
This negative attitude towards the ḥāshiya was evident in the reform laws of al-Azhar. For example, an 1896 law outlawed the teaching of the ḥāshiya in the first four years of study and forbade the use of the tertiary commentaries (taqārīr) unless a student had received special permission from the Azhar Administrative Council. Pierre Arminjon, L’enseignement, la doctrine et la vie dans les universités musulmanes d’Égypte (Paris: Librairies Felix Alcan et Guillaumin Réunies, 1907), 287–88. Although Salafi scholars have been among those who criticized the ḥāshiya, it is worth noting that they have a complex relationship to the genre. On the one hand, their general anticlericalism and calls to return to the Qurʾān and Sunna naturally puts them at odds with the textual form, while on the other, their efforts to read their approach to Islam back into history has made them both engage with and write commentaries on classical texts. Shiliwala, “Constructing a Textual Tradition,” 465–70.
As a comparison to Jumʿa’s narrative, El-Rouayheb explains that in the field of logic, the genre of the ḥāshiya became widespread in Eastern Islamic lands after the fourteenth century, but that in the western Islamic tradition, the ḥāshiya did not proliferate until the seventeenth century. The Development of Arabic Logic (1200–1800) (Basel: Schwabe Verlag Basel, 2018), 77, 125. Walid A. Saleh argues that the genre of the ḥāshiya was essential in shaping the history of tafsīr, particularly after the seventh century AH/thirteenth century CE, when glossing came to be prevalent. “The Gloss as Intellectual History: The Ḥāshiyas on al-Kashshāf,” Oriens 41, no. 3–4 (2013): 218.
For Sulaymān al-Jamal, see ʿUmar Riḍā Kaḥḥāla, Muʿjam al-muʾallifīn: tarājim muṣannifī al-kutub al-ʿarabiyya (Beirut: Maktabat al-Muthannā, 1957), 4:271–72.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūri, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 12.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 12.
Jumʿa, “Muqaddimat al-taḥqīq,” in al-Bājūrī, Tuḥfat al-Murīd, 12–13.
Ismail, “Al‐Azhar and the Salafis in Egypt,” 14.
See, for instance, ʿAlī Jumʿa, Ḥikāyat al-irhāb (Cairo: Dār al-Nahār lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʿ, 2017), 5–13.
Masooda Bano, “At the Tipping Point? Al-Azhar’s Growing Crisis of Moral Authority,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no. 4 (2018): 715–34.
Fadel, “Islamic Law and Constitution-Making,” 472–507.