While scholars have long studied how Muslims authenticated and transmitted Muhammad’s sayings and practices (hadith), the story of how Muslims interpreted and reinterpreted hadith across a millennium or more has yet to be told. Said the Prophet of God takes up this charge, illuminating the rich social and intellectual stakes of hadith commentary in the times and places it came to life: classical Andalusia, medieval Egypt, and modern India. The book closes with an epilogue on how commentary has been taken up by contemporary Islamist groups such as ISIS. Weaving together tales of high court rivalries, colonial politics, and contemporary field notes with explorations of the fine-grained debates among hadith commentators, Said the Prophet of God offers an interdisciplinary audience new avenues for understanding traditions of interpretation at the intersection of social and intellectual history across long periods of time.

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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.