The “commentary” (sharḥ, taʿlīq, ḥāshiya, taqrīr, etc.) has arguably been the dominant genre of post-classical Islamic scholarly writing from the 13th century CE onwards. Despite this genre’s dominance, its versatility and innumerable avenues for exploration, etic Orientalist scholarship has initially struggled to come to terms with this kind of text dismissing it as “unoriginal, slavish, repetitive” and the hallmark of an alleged era of intellectual decline. In fact, this dismissive stance can also be observed in some emic Arabic scholarly milieus of the 20th century. This has begun to change and new research has already shown that commentaries are complex writings that can fulfil a plethora of functions. Commentators engage in all kinds of intellectual activity ranging from interpreting the base text (matn) and explaining it, to criticising, rejecting, endorsing, justifying choices made, proving, disproving, adding, correcting, updating, editing, structuring, contextualising and much more.
A desideratum in the study of the commentary genre is the study of commentary corpora that formed around certain base texts, which can cover the entire gamut of disciplines, particularly but not exclusively Islamic law (fiqh). These corpora represent the written manifestation of interpretive communities of these base texts and could reach staggering numbers of titles, span wide geographical areas and persist for many centuries. As such, a commentary corpus can embody a transregional confluence of minds who engage not only with the base text, which acts as its focal point, but also with each other – creating a virtual large-scale and long-term republic of letters.
The Risāla Commentary Corpus (RCC) is the first project that aims to explore the accumulation of commentaries of Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī’s (386/996) Risāla quantitatively. The Risāla is an influential early legal digest of the Mālikī school of law, which contains a renowned chapter on the Sunnī creed (ʿaqīda). It has attracted more than 200 commentaries over the last millennium penned by scholars from al-Andalus, North Africa (including Mauritania and Sudan), the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq. The data set gathers key information about the commentaries, the commentators and the manuscript record of the corpus, which will allow researchers to analyse its regional hubs, to compare and contrast their development over time and to pursue other avenues. This material carries the potential to advance our understanding of the Mālikī school of law, the genre of (legal) commentaries and its contribution to the historical development of the textual universe of the Sharīʿa as a whole.
Version 1.0 (uploaded 25.03.2025) contains 217 Risāla commentaries, written by 186 commentators, materialised in 831 manuscripts (alongside countless print copies).
