Islamic scholarly texts physically enacted a concentric layering of commentary around a core text

Evidence

The sequence of learning was also the sequence of scholarship. A scholar at al-Azhar, we are told, would prepare a legal opinion, a lesson, or a disputation, by placing all the books which discussed the question he wanted to elucidate on a low table in front of him, arranging them in sequences radiating from the middle: ‘at the centre is the original text (matn), then the commentary (shark) on this text, then the gloss on the commentary (hashiya) and finally the explication of the gloss (takrir)’. The books often repeated this arrangement themselves, as the picture on p. 147 illustrates: a text might be accompanied by a commentary written between the lines, or even inserted between the words themselves, with a further gloss upon the commentary written in the margin, surrounding the text on all sides, just as the circles of commentaries on the table surrounded the central text. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 291

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the matn/shark/hashiya/takrir hierarchy of textual commentary — a concrete terminology often unfamiliar.
• XREF: connects to: Homo islamicus named a fixed Muslim essence readable from texts alone; A scholarly corpus gains influence through later reception and appropriation — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 12