The Perils of Public Commentary

If he answered yes, all would judge him, justifiably,
the readiest and most gratuitous of impostors;
if he answered no, he would be judged an infidel.

— Jorge Luis Borges

In the fifth/eleventh century, after having traveled to Mecca to study hadith, an Andalusian scholar returned to the Iberian Peninsula with a report whose plain meaning offered a provocative suggestion: "Muhammad did not write well, but he wrote." For at least a century prior, a powerful and popularly received doctrine had evolved that held that the Prophet's status as "unlettered" (ummi) was a miraculous proof of his sincerity. After all, they claimed, an unlettered Prophet could not have been capable of composing the Qur'an. Interpreters pointed to a verse from the Qur'an in which God tells Muhammad, "You did not inscribe it with your right hand lest those who falsify have cause for doubt." A hadith that suggested otherwise required serious explanation.

While many Muslim scholars of the time circumvented this hadith in various ways, Abu al-Walid al-Baji (d. 474/1081) chose to take the text at face value: Muhammad did write by hand. But Baji did not scribble this interpretive impression in the margins of a gloss, where it could easily be forgotten. He offered this reading in public, at a session in which he interpreted hadith for a live audience (majlis min tafsir al-hadith). A local and transregional fiasco followed in its wake, which drew poets, preachers, politicians, and the populace into the fray, some going as far as to say that Baji had committed a capital offense and to demand that he be held accountable.

For one recent historian, the event marked but one data point within a larger trend of polemical debates about the status of the Prophet during this period, and how they went beyond the restricted circles of hadith scholars, even "spilling over into public demonstrations." But the Baji affair also offers us rare insight into the dynamics of an early live commentary session on the hadith. Centuries later, live reading sessions on Sahih al-Bukhari would reach new heights at the citadel in Mamluk Cairo, where readings took place in the presence of the sultan, the chief justices, and the civilian elite. But even at this early date — one of the earliest documented live hadith commentary sessions — the Baji affair teaches us that live commentaries could serve as a highly visible forum in which standards of excellence as well as material and social rewards were at stake.

By examining the Baji affair in greater detail, then, I hope to convey a larger historiographical point: reading in Islamic societies, embodied by live performances and handwritten materials, can be rewardingly understood at the intersection of both social and intellectual history. After all, the Baji affair teaches us that while commentators interpreted and debated in order to compete for survival in the everyday scholarly scene, they were simultaneously reading to achieve certain interpretive excellences that were defining of and defined by the cumulative tradition of commentary.

DID MUHAMMAD WRITE BY HAND? A LIVE DEBATE

The story of the Baji affair begins in the seaside town of Denia, on the southeastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, in the latter part of the fifth/ eleventh century. This was an era of intense political turmoil in which the Umayyad caliphate in Cordoba sighed its last breath, giving way to an era of party kings. In addition to the political and economic tumult, or perhaps because of it, travel from Iberia eastward to the Near East for study and commerce declined. Denia was one of some twelve cities across the Iberian Peninsula in which Muslim scholars are known to have studied, taught, and worked, although it was on the periphery. At the time, almost a third of Muslim scholars documented had settled in Cordoba, since it offered relatively greater stability during the unrest.

Hadith had been circulating in the Iberian Peninsula by the third/ ninth century, many of which were introduced through legal compendia and collections of traditions, such as Abu Dawud's Sunan and Malik's Muwatta', the latter of which held the highest status in the Andalusian context. Sahih al-Bukhari's circulation in the Islamic West only preceded the Baji affair by approximately half a century, as a hadith scholar from Tripoli is credited with the earliest systematic commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari in the West. Alongside Khattabi's, it would have been the earliest such work worldwide.

Prior to the fall of the caliphate, a number of Andalusian scholars who traveled eastward for business, study, or pilgrimage returned home having received recitations of Sahih al-Bukhari on high authority. This fed the growing interest in the science of evaluating hadith transmitters ('ilm al-rijal) in Andalusia. One hadith scholar from this period who had spent time studying hadith abroad was so devoted to this practice that it was said that Bukhari appeared to him in a dream in order to settle a technical question on the reliability of a transmitter who had fallen short of the compiler's standards.

Likewise, Baji, a major voice among Maliki hadith scholars after the fall of the Umayyad caliphate, had spent years in Mecca immersed in study with some of the greatest living authorities on hadith. One of them was from as far east as Herat, in what would be modern-day Afghanistan. Just as Baji had returned home, in the middle of the fifth/ eleventh century, two of the earliest Andalusian authorities on Bukhari's collection passed away, al-Muhallab ibn Abi Sufra of Almeria (d. ca. 435/1044) and his better-known student, Ibn Battal of Cordoba (d. 444/1052–53 or 449/1057). Although students were still busy copying and transmitting Muhallab's and Ibn Battal's written commentaries on Bukhari's collection within Andalusia, local audiences no doubt turned to Baji as the nearest living authority on it. Indeed, Baji's personal link to the chains of transmission to this collection was so prestigious that his dictation of it to a student was used as the basis for later manuscripts in the Islamic West for the centuries that followed.

Thus Baji traveled from town to town, including Denia, teaching, transmitting, and interpreting canonical...