Emblematic or Exceptional? aṣ-Ṣafadī’s Ghayth and ad-Damāmīnī’s Nuzūl

Khalīlb Aybak aṣ-Ṣafadī’s (d.764/1363) exuberant discursive commentary al-Ghayth al-musajjam fī sharḥ «Lāmiyyatal-ʿajam» is regarded today by many to be a masterpiece of Arabic literary commentary. It satisfies contemporary scholars’ interests in intertextuality, canonization, commentary and manuscript culture, and meta-literature. This paper asks whether the text was as beloved at the time of its writing as it is today? On the one hand, we can be certain that aṣ-Ṣafadī’s text was not as emblematic of the period’s literary characteristics for contemporaries as it is for scholar’s today. For them, it was one among many texts of that kind and though it may have been regarded as a masterpiece of the genre, contemporaries were not as preoccupied with the significance of the commentary as a literary genre and canon-contouring act as we are today. This is partly because it is difficult to realize period-defining art and artists contemporary to one’s own life, but it is also partly because audiences and authors at the time did not view literary commentaries as being particularly implicated in debates over what was canonical. This means, therefore, that scholars must be aware of the pressure that their own biases and professional needs exercise on the map of literary history. In 794/1392, some thirty years after Khalīlb Aybak aṣ-Ṣafadī’s death, an Alexandrian scholar Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr b.ʿUmarad Damāmīnī (d.827/1424), the scion of an important scholarly family, wrote a book-length attack on aṣ-Ṣafadī’s commentary. This combative, philological commentary on aṣ-Ṣafadī’s commentary, which ad-Damāmīnī called Nuzūl «al-Ghayth», is notable today only because it was an attack on a famous literary masterpiece. What is interesting, however, about ad-Damāmīnī’s counter-commentary is that it brings the discussion provoked by aṣ-Ṣafadī back to the grammatical realm where it, may be argued, the act of commenting was most securely rooted. Seen from the perspective of ad-Damāmīnī’s text, we may understand commentary as the simultaneous deployment of two critical processes, intertextual and grammatical criticism, that were not treated as equally inherent to the commentary genre. This analysis would thus cast aṣ-Ṣafadī’s commentary in a new light such that it would appear to us a masterpiece not for being emblematic but for being exceptional.