Muslim tradition (ḥadīth) has captivated scholars of early and medieval Islam ever since Ignáz Goldziher published the pathfinding second volume of his Muhammedanische Studien (1890). Western academia pondered over ḥadīth authenticity, modes of ḥadīth transmission, dating and reconstructing of the traditions’ substantive content (matn), earliest ḥadīth collections, and the role of ḥadīth in legal and theological debates. Comprehensive as they were, these reflections largely overlooked ḥadīth commentary (sharḥ al-ḥadīth). Joel Blecher's monograph Said the Prophet of God: Ḥadīth Commentary across a Millennium aims at filling this scholarly gap. With an admirable expertise and impressive knowledge of minute detail, Blecher traverses the exegetical reception and commentarial re-enactment of al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ across space and time. His journey begins in fifth/eleventh-century Andalusia and ends in present-day India, Pakistan, and Syria.

Blecher posits three methodological premises as the basis of his treatment of the topic (pp. 13–18). First, he challenges the notion that ḥadīth commentary is only a literary practice. His perusal of Islamic sources reinforced by personal experience with live commentary leads him to assert that commenting al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ amounted to “multisensory experience” (pp. 14, 146, 147, 151, 154) comprising recitation sessions, lively debates, and oral lessons in public. Second, Blecher is attentive to the material benefits and social influence sought by ḥadīth commentators in their interaction with political authorities and wider audience. Third, he is careful not to let sociological analysis overshadow his study at the expense of the scholarly aspects of ḥadīth commentary. Although bearing on the scholars’ fortunes and wellbeing, sharḥ al-ḥadīth may not be relegated to a mere pursuit of social prestige, political patronage, and material gains. It carries along a high intellectual value, or “interpretative excellences” as Blecher calls the commentators’ striving for scholarly creativity and methodological perfection.

The book opens with a vivid description of the controversy caused by Abū al-Walīd al-Bājī’s (d. 474/1081) assertion that, towards the end of his life, the Prophet was able to write (pp. 21–9). This affair, which broke out during a public lesson by al-Bājī in Dénia, is illustrative of the hermeneutical tension between ḥadīth, in this case a tradition from al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ outwardly suggesting the Prophet wrote by hand in the treaty of al-Ḥudaybiyya (6/628), and theology, which holds that he was illiterate. Blecher shows how al-Bājī was able to reconcile the literal understanding of ḥadīth with the doctrine of the Prophet's illiteracy derived from the Quran, by considering the event at al-Ḥudaybiyya as one of the Prophet's miracles, which, moreover, occurred after the illiteracy verses had been sent down and was, therefore, not at odds with the chronology of revelation. By this “double movement”, to use Blecher's expression, al-Bājī was not only saving his life and preserving his scholarly reputation, but he was also addressing methodological issues arising from disputes with Ẓāhirī literalists about the ways to understand and interpret ḥadīth.

The famous commentator of the Ṣaḥīḥ Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449) is no less prominent in Blecher's book than al-Bukhārī himself. In the third chapter (pp. 49–64), Blecher dwells on the composition of Ibn Ḥajar's capacious Fatḥ al-Bārī, which remains until now the most outstanding commentary of the Ṣaḥīḥ. The reader learns how commentators of the Mamluk era went about their work, and senses its scholarly and social significance. As personal rivalries were prominent in the ninth/fifteenth-century Cairo scholarly landscape, Blecher pays close attention to the feud between Ibn Ḥajar and Badr al-ʿAynī (d. 855/1451), in which both intellectual and political stakes ran high, and specific conceptions of authorship and scholarly creativity came into play.

The controversial Shāfiʿī chief justice Shams al-Dīn al-Harawī (d. 829/1426), who was of non-Arab extraction, stands out in the fifth chapter of the book (pp. 80–97). Blecher shows how concepts of ethnic identity, scholarly excellence, and rhetorical accomplishment were intertwined with pursuit of personal benefits before the political elite. By comparing Ibn Ḥajar's lively autobiographical account of his encounter with al-Harawī with the same account in Fatḥ al-Bārī, Blecher casts a rare glimpse into how genre boundaries impinged upon the contents, style, and purpose of the same report.

Blecher's treatment of ḥadīth commentary by a combination of methods from the fields of social history, intellectual history, and social theory is commendable, as is his aspiration to foreground the performative and interactional aspects of the commentator's activity. This approach yields excellent results where our textual sources preserve references to performative life settings, as in the case of al-Bājī and the lively commentarial sessions in ninth-/fifteenth-century Cairo. In other cases, as, for instance, al-Suyūṭī’s short and dry commentaries (pp. 129–39), such sessions are not attested in the sources. Their absence, noted by Blecher (p. 131), as well as the exegetically demanding treatment of al-Bukhārī’s cryptic chapter headings (pp. 111–28), suggest that ḥadīth commentary might be restricted to a narrower and properly trained audience, away from the trappings of public performance whereby scholarly excellence and rhetorical mastery were harnessed in pursuit of social capital.

In the end, Blecher has contributed to both understanding and endorsing the canonicity of al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ. Transregional and transtemporal in its sociological value and intellectual appeal, this ḥadīth corpus has become an essential part of Muslim identity and modern scholars’ drive to understand it.

A few errors crept into the book: p. 4: the Prophet died in the year 11/632, not 10/632 as stated by Blecher; p. 72: salāf should be salaf; pp. 75–6, and 223, note 31: maratayn should be marratayn; p. 85: al-iṣṭilāḥ al-miṣriyya should be, according to the author's transliteration conventions, al-iṣṭilāḥ al-miṣrī; p. 95: al-Muwaṭṭaʾ is a work associated with Mālik b. Anas, not Anas b. Mālik; p. 145: al-nūr al-sāfir stands for “revealing light” rather than “travelling light”; p. 259: al-Jāmʿi al-ṣaḥīḥ should be al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ.