Abstract
How did the deepening canonization of key hadith collections like Sahih al-Bukhari in the Mamluk period influence the commentator’s ability to introduce or discover new meanings in the text? This chapter takes up this question by tracking the development of a hermeneutic technique that justified not only one’s commentarial authority over Sahih al-Bukhari but also promised to disclose the “secret essence of Sahih al-Bukhari”: the analysis of Bukhari’s chapter headings (tarajim) and paratexts. While postclassical Andalusian hadith scholars wondered whether the problematic chapter headings in Bukhari’s Sahih were inadvertent errors, a marked change occurs among later commentators in Egypt, such as Ibn al-Munayyir (d. 1284) and Ibn Hajar, who viewed them as riddles containing Bukhari’s hidden intentions. Since the titles’ meanings were often underdetermined, commentators could claim to be faithful to Bukhari’s compilatory goal while simultaneously deriving novel meanings from the text.
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