The Medieval Scientific Commentary as Critical Apparatus

This paper draws attention to the ancillary role of the Arabic scientific commentary as a critical apparatus to canonical texts. While exegesis may be considered as the commentary’s prime function, the commentary is also the site where scholars determine and reimagine the correct reading of transmitted texts. In his commentary, the exegete gradually provides the complete, canonical, source text based on his interpretation of multiple manuscript copies, while he oftentimes supplements plausible or rejected variant readings in his accompanying commentary. To this end, commentators employ various critical philological methods. Thus, the commentary was an invaluable source of textual criticism for medieval scholars, while to the modern scholar it sheds crucial light on medieval philological practices and the varied understandings and versions of canonical works in circulation at the time. This paper illustrates this by studying the exegetical work of the physicians ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al- Baghdādī (1162-1231) and Ibn al-Quff (1233-1286) who in their commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms reflect on the correct reading of each Hippocratic aphorism. After a critical comparison and examination of the various copies at their disposal, the exegetes report the outcome of their philological efforts in the body of their commentary. Such philological activity required the medieval Islamic physician to be a grammarian, a man of letters, as much as a scientist. The commentary thus became a central and crucial literary site for the transmission of canonical works in the Classical Islamic world, and should be considered as such by modern scholars.