In recent years, students of Islamic studies have taken an increasing interest in the genre of commentaries. This development is part of a general re-evaluation of Islamic intellectual history in the medieval and early modern periods, which some Islamicists call the “post-classical” period. Earlier scholarship in the West and in many parts of the Islamic world characterized this period as one of “decline” or “decadence” that produced relatively little original thought. In this vein, scholars portrayed the flowering of commentarial literature as a shift away from originality towards the composition of textbooks and scholasticism. Recent scholarship, on the other hand, has emphasized the ways in which commentators located themselves within established traditions of scholarship while developing them and diverging from them. Medieval and early modern Muslim scholars had to contend with existing textual traditions and schools of thought in law, theology, and Sufism, among many other subjects, but the process of elaborating a school of thought, addressing its internal contradictions and relations with other schools, was a creative process.

This book belongs to this recent trend. It focuses on two commentaries, on Shāfiʿī law and Sufism, by a prominent Egyptian judge and Sufi Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (826–926/1423–1520) who was a prolific author of commentaries on a variety of subjects. Indeed, the commentary was al-Anṣārī's preferred mode of composition, making him an excellent case study of the commentarial tradition. Al-Anṣārī lived at a time when Sufism and Islamic law had largely converged, at least among the learned, urban elite. Al-Anṣārī was well known for his practice of asceticism, something that may have endeared him to Sultan Qāyitbāy, who appointed him chief Shāfiʿī judge of the Mamluk Empire. Unfortunately, his lack of political savvy also undermined al-Anṣārī's ability to function as an administrator, and the appointment of incompetent or unscrupulous subordinates got him into trouble. In spite of this, al-Anṣārī enjoyed a reputation for exemplary piety and as an authoritative teacher.

Matthew Ingalls provides a long-overdue study of al-Anṣārī's life, as background to his study of two of his commentaries. The strength of this work, like many of its recent predecessors in Islamic studies, lies in its study of the formal aspects of the authorship of commentaries. Much of the work is devoted to a careful examination of the commentaries in comparison with the earlier texts on which they comment. Ingalls shows how subtle shifts in language allow al-Anṣārī implicitly to criticize authoritative works such as the Risāla of al-Qushayrī, a widely read Sufi manual, without directly undermining that authority. This approach highlights the dilemma of the commentator. A commentator who wishes to diverge from the original text can never lose sight of the fact that the authority of the commentary depends on the authority of the original text.

The emphasis on textual approaches to the study of commentaries does have disadvantages. At times, this study reads as a simple comparison between two texts. While illuminating in many ways, this approach does not do justice to the historical developments between the time and place in which the two texts were composed. Ingalls is aware of the general developments in Sufism and law in the Mamluk era, for example, but is less interested in the milieu of late fifteenth-century Cairo. When discussing al-Anṣārī's defence of the Sufi poet Ibn al-Fāriḍ, he cautiously avoids connecting al-Anṣārī's opinion with the public debate on the poet's orthodoxy. In the unlikely event that al-Anṣārī was not writing with this debate in mind, his opinion would certainly have been so read by others. Furthermore, one need not attribute every shift in al-Anṣārī's commentary to one specific event in his life, a deeper familiarity with the period and its primary and secondary literature would permit Ingalls to place al-Anṣārī more firmly in his context.

Some of Ingalls's arguments are likely to be controversial. He argues that al-Anṣārī's attempts to eliminate any contradictions between statements by different Sufi masters by treating them as “a single consistent text” bestows upon them the status of scripture. One could argue that this phenomenon does not differ much from the process of the institutionalization of a school of law (madhhab), and some Sufi authors do make such an analogy. For Ingalls to make the jump from authoritative text to scripture is an interesting move, but one replete with theological implications. Sufi claims to divine inspiration presented a powerful challenge to the claims of the jurists to privileged knowledge, but these claims need to be examined in greater detail than Ingalls is able to do here.

Formally, Ingalls argues that interwoven (mamzūj) commentaries tended to erase the distinction between the original text and the commentary, bestowing greater control over the text to the commentator. Another approach, which al-Anṣārī employs in his commentaries on law, is to abridge the original text and comment on his own abridgement. These abridgement-commentaries fell within a larger process of textual abbreviation and elaboration within the Shāfiʿī legal school that was already centuries old when al-Anṣārī made his contributions. Unsurprisingly for legal historians, Ingalls concludes that later authorities often displaced the school's founder altogether, a process facilitated by the commentator's choice of lemma. Naturally, the changes made to the original text by one abbreviation influenced the options available to subsequent commentators, but Ingalls may underestimate the continued availability of earlier versions of the text.

Another chapter examines al-Anṣārī's influence on subsequent generations of scholars. His descendants formed a scholarly lineage that continued to play an important role in scholarship in Egypt and memorialized their pious ancestor, a phenomenon that was common in the Ottoman period. His views on the compatibility of law and Sufism influenced such figures as Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī.

Ingalls presents al-Anṣārī as an example of the creative nature of the commentarial tradition. Perhaps it would be best to abandon the apologetic discourse of creativity and frankly acknowledge, as Ingalls often does, the active role of appropriation played by commentators.