Stefanie Brinkmann: “Struggling with the Margin: Studying Marginal Commentaries in a Hadith Collection: Al-Baghawī’s Maṣābīḥ al-sunna”

Abstract

Stefanie Brinkmann illustrates both the challenges of working with marginal commentaries and their potential, with the example of a selection of manuscripts from the seventh/thirteenth to the tenth/sixteenth century containing the post-canonical hadith collection Maṣābīḥ al-sunna by al-Ḥusayn al-Baghawī (d. 516/1122). After exemplifying the difficulties in identifying possible sources of the marginal notes, she highlights the significance of these notes, focusing on the question of which texts were used to study the Maṣābīḥ al-sunna. To this end, she classifies five possible layers of commentary and analyses the varying impact that these different commentaries have had on the study of the Maṣābīḥ al-sunna. The manuscripts of al-Baghawī's hadith collection and the marginal citations in them clearly show the importance of the Mongol and post-Mongol periods for this particular hadith tradition.

Stefanie Brinkmann: “Struggling with the Margin: Studying Marginal Commentaries in a Hadith Collection: Al-Baghawī’s Maṣābīḥ al-sunna”, in Marginal Matters. Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, ed. Stefanie Brinkmann, Leiden and Berlin: Brill Publishers, 2025, 343-390.

The volume is open access