In recent years, historians of Islam and Islamic thought have begun to recognize that the medium of the commentary—in Arabic sharḥ, which took both oral and written forms—was a vibrant hub of social and intellectual life in the middle period of Islamic history. Far from a derivative and tralacious genre—a mischaracterization first suggested by some Orientalists in the 19^th-century and 20^th-centuries that lingers in some quarters to this day—recent scholarship has shown how Muslim thinkers in the post-classical age used the medium to grapple with long-standing intellectual problems, sometimes arriving at innovative solutions to old interpretive puzzles. The medium spanned nearly all disciplines of intellectual life—law, Qur’an, hadith, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, literature, grammar, among others—and served as the dominant platform for instruction and intellectual debate.

Given its prominence as a public practice, it should come as little surprise that both chronicle and documentary sources suggest that commentaries inhered social and economic value: sultans doled out prestigious teaching appointments, judgeships, and stipends to distinguished commentators; wealthy patrons traded revenues from lands to acquire rare copies of celebrated commentaries; seekers of knowledge arranged maritime business trips to have the honor of hearing a commentator deliver his work live to a madrasa full of students; and, every once in a while, a controversial commentary could even spur a local protest movement.

This panel seeks to advance this important conversation in the field by bringing together three cutting-edge studies of post-classical commentaries on literature, hadith, and medicine, from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Persia from the 12^th-15^th centuries. Each presentation, which will be delivered in the informal style of a relaxed workshop, will attempt, in its own way, to shed new light on the intellectual techniques and social functions of the commentary genre within its respective field. Appropriately, one the world’s leading historians of the genre of tafsīr (Qur’an commentary) will then comment on the major themes of the panel, and the continuities and differences of each of the presenters’ case studies.

The Q&A discussion afterwards will address a wide range of topics related to commentaries, including how textual canons are manage across time and space, the interplay with orality and public reading, and the research agenda for the field over the coming decade. The panel is aimed at scholars of Islamic and Middle East history as well as broader historians who study cultures of interpretation and the history of education.