EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 193tual obscurities, narrative materials often of Jewish or Christian origin, and
legal interpretation according to topics. Verse- by- verse commentary was not
yet customary, but became so—with hadīth invoked to explain each verse’s
context—when Tabarī (d. 923), whom we have already encountered as an
historian, wrote what quickly came to be regarded as the commentary par
excellence on the Qurʾān. It was titled The sum of clarity concerning the inter-
pretation of the verses of the Qurʾān. As in the History, Tabarī drew extensively
on less systematic predecessors, and put them largely out of circulation. The
Qurʾān commentary deploys not just theological and legal erudition—
Tabarī trained as a jurist and was briefly the eponym of his own legal school—
but also on grammar and lexicography, other fields essential to the under-
standing of scripture that were coming of age in the tenth century.^140 A
carefully constructed monument of Sunni orthodoxy, The sum of clarity
quickly became the focus of its own industry of epitomes, translations (into
Persian), and supercommentaries. One might well wonder, whether Tabarī
consciously borrowed the techniques of Aristotelian commentary in order to
consolidate a very different style of thinking.^141
But the most important field for the community as a whole was law. Shāfiʿī
founded one of the four major legal communities (more traditionally called
“schools”) that dominate Islam to this day. Besides the Shafi‘is and the Han-
balis, there are also the Hanafis derived from Abū Hanīfa (d. 767), and the
Malikis named after Mālik ibn Anas (d. 795). One perceives ever more clearly
the significance of the early Abbasid period in Islam’s maturation—particu-
larly through the formation of new scholarly elites keen to assert their au-
tonomy from state authority.
As already remarked, Shāfiʿī introduced a stronger hadīth element into
legal thought in order to secure an irrefragable basis for his rulings. This im-
parted a distinctive atmosphere to the legal communities, whose scholarly
elites powerfully remind one of the rabbis of Pumbedita or Sepphoris. There
is the same minute concern with elaborating law from scripture and con-
structing exhaustive literary corpora based on oral transmission of opinions
from teacher to pupil. There is the same ambiguity about the status and au-
thority of a nonordained scholarly elite lacking the Christian clerg y’s unique
role in communal worship. And from at least the second century of Islam
rabbis and hadīth scholars, at least those in the law schools’ main center,
Baghdad, dwelt in the same city and could have been alert to each other’s
activities.^142 It is likely that the rabbinical academies influenced Muslim
140 M. G. Carter, “Arabic lexicography” and “Arabic grammar,” in M. J. L. young and others (eds),
Religion, learning and science in the ʿAbbasid period (Cambridge 1990) 106–38.
141 The suggestion of Sinai, Fortschreibung und Auslegung [1:8] 278 n. 68.
142 On Hebrew grammar borrowed wholesale from Arabic, e.g., by Saadiah Gaon, see F. Pontani,
““Only God knows the correct reading!”: The role of Homer, the Quran and the Bible in the rise of phi-