Bridging the Gap: Texts, Commentaries and the new Audience

The study of commentaries (sharh, hawashi, nukat) has steadily increased in recent years. While commentators could have chosen to write a "non-commentarial" text, they preferred to elaborate their ideas on the basis of an earlier text. The commentator was a mediator par excellence, keeping a text relevant, both by commenting on it and adding to it, and by connecting that text to the ever-changing environment that studied it. With that, a commentator both confirmed the intellectual and social significance of the base text, while at the same time bridging the gap between the base text and the changing audience, playing a role of the intermediary between them.

Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fo9RL-74JUM

Programme: https://www.islamische-theologie.hu-berlin.de/de/bridging-the-gap-international-conference.pdf