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hadīth were nonetheless accepted as an extension of revelation.^136 The most
influential collections (written, but ideally first heard rather than read), were
the Sahīhayn composed by two pupils of Ibn Hanbal, Bukhārī (d. 870; active
at Bukhārā and Nīshāpūr) and Muslim (d. 875, active at Nīshāpūr). These
also contained biographical materials to facilitate authentification, and
Qurʾanic commentary. Since these are the best- known books in Islam after
the Qurʾān, one sees that the religion’s exegetical phase became one of its
defining features. The attempt to make a closed, scholar- authorized canon
out of what had hitherto been a more fluid, democratic oral tradition met
with initial resistance—and the more informal approach continued as late as
the twelfth century. But by the mid- eleventh century the authority of the
two collections was established through consensus among scholars spreading
from Khurāsān through the cities of Iran to eventually conquer Baghdad and
then spread westward to Spain.^137 The canonization process’s independence
of central or conciliar authority we have already noted in the case of the New
Testament canon; and one of the achievements of rabbinic scholarship has
been to discredit the role once accorded the late- first- century “Council of
yavneh/Jamnia” in finalizing the Jewish Bible.^138 (The quick- off- the- mark
and top- down ʿUthmanic edition of the Qur’an was another matter.)
Hadīth were the foundation of Islam’s exegetical phase. Space allows us to
touch here, briefly, on three major areas of Muslim thought and literary pro-
duction which repose on their authority: Qurʾānic exegesis itself, law, and
h i stor y.
I noted above that the Qurʾān already contains many passages that com-
ment or elaborate on materials from the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
Also that exegesis of scripture crops up in many branches of early Arabic lit-
erature, for example in hadīth and even in writers of philosophical tendency.
But systematic commentary, as known to us from the philosophical and
Christian traditions, took time to emerge.^139 By the late Umayyad period
there was already beginning to be significant literary activity on this front,
and it continued throughout the later eighth and ninth centuries. It probably
mainly consisted of grammatical and lexical notes on the Qurʾān’s many tex-
136 Schacht, Introduction to Islamic law [6:47] 58–60; Melchert, Sunni schools of law [6:135]
68–86.
137 Brown, Canonization [3:18], esp. 56–58 (elitism of canon); 60–64 (durability of living isnād);
103, 124–35, 374–77 (dissemination of Sahīhayn); 209–61 (Sahīhayn exemplars of authenticity and
authority).
138 J. P. Lewis, “Jamnia revisited,” in McDonald and Sanders (eds), Canon debate [6:90] 146–62.
Fārābī insists, quite unhistorically, on the role of a council of bishops in fixing the canon of Christian
Aristotelianism: above, p. 148.
139 On Qurʾanic exegesis up to and including Tabarī, see C. Gilliot, “Exegesis of the Qurʾān: Clas-
sical and medieval,” EQ 2.102–11. On the earliest period, see also Sinai, Fortschreibung und Auslegung
[1:8] 161–288.