The Anonymity of a Commentator: Zakariyya al-Ansari and the Rhetoric of Muslim Commentaries

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The Anonymity of a Commentator examines the life and writings of the Egyptian Sufi-scholar Zakariyya al-Ansari (d. 926/1520), the longest-serving chief Shafi'i justice to the Mamluk sultanate during its final years. It analyzes al-Ansari’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-Ansari 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.