Cannibalizing Commentary and the Mouvance of Beards: Manuscript Culture in Twin Commentaries from Al-Andalus and the Levant

The Maqamat of al-Hariri attracted scores of commentaries from the date of its composition at the dawn of the 12th century down to the 19th century. This collection of fifty trickster stories, often assumed to be subversive to Islamic norms, was in fact central to the Islamic scholarly tradition of study from Spain to the Ivory Coast to Indonesia. However, many of these commentaries remain available only in manuscript. This paper tells the story of two early and influential commentaries, one by al-Panjdihi (d. 1188) and the other by al-Sharishi (d. 1222). The Andalusian scholar al-Sharishi took much of his material from al-Panjdihi who hailed from Persian East and worked in the Levant. However, al-Sharishi reformulated his predecessor's commentary in important ways, adding new bits and removing others. By focusing on how these two commentaries respond to a reference to beards, I will explore the ways in which the cannibalization of commentary ends up being a rather messy and regurgitative affair. That is, al-Sharishi's borrowings had a significant impact on the later manuscript tradition of al-Panjdihi's commentary, an effect usually referred to as “contamination.” The fate of this section on beards offers important opportunities for thinking about both the vagaries of manuscript culture and the prospects for editing a cannibalized commentary.