I seem to recall hearing or reading something about the commentaries associated with the Koran, and wanted to know if I remembered correctly.
My memory is that after the Koran was written, it attracted an increasing number of commentaries, which grew in number to the point where Islamic authorities in the centuries after the life of the Prophet decided that the best course was simply to close the book (so to speak) on any new commentaries, leaving only an ancient set of canonical commentaries with proper religious authority.
Is this so?
A check of Wikipedia indicates that there are Tafsir, but that reference does not really seem to indicate that the list is now closed. It indicates that there is great conservatism in approaching exegeses of the Koran, and that modern commentaries tend merely to be derivative of older ones, but that does not really answer my query.
Was there a closure by anything like an authoritative religious source, akin to the compilation of which books would and would not be in the Bible, of the canonical commentaries?
Of course, it may be that the closure (if such there be) only exists in one of many Islamic traditions.
Does anybody know if my recollection has any basis?
I think you’re actually thinking of itjihad, which is to say legalistic interpretations of the Quran. There is a well known aphorism that the states that the “gates to itjihad closed in the 10th century.” This refers to the Sunni madhabs, or schools of jurisprudence, indicating that all the basic permutations of laws on issues like social mores that can be gleaned from the text of the hadiths and Quran have been more or less settled for each of the four major schools.
But, no - no authoritative body decreed this. It seems it was more a gradual philosophical tendency that slowly solidified. And the exceptions are legion. All Shi’a Muslims almost by definition, paradoxically both some modern liberal Sunnis and ultra-orthodox Wahhabis, some sufi orders ( including Sunni ones like the Sanusiyya of Libya ). The above wikipedia article goes into all of this a bit.
ETA: One can think of it a bit like the difference on the U.S. Supreme court between “originalists” and “living constitutionalists” .
You need to understand that the Quran is (despite what is often put forward) NOT a legal book. Out thousands of verses, you have about 80 which deal directly or indirectly with legal issues.
So what is “Islamic law” if such a term can even be used? Well its essentially the legal system that came into being in the centuries after the arrival of islam on the world map. When scholors and judges were faced with a question, they usually came to a conclusion through consesus or analogy. Over the centuries two patterns emerged. Firstly you had the rise of various schools of legal thought and philosophy, these were often (though not always) geographic in nature, and usually differed with each other to a great deal. And secondly you had a great amount of legal writings and decisions on various matters. Eventually it became easier to answer an issue by simply relying on the precedent that already existed; much as you do in common law countries with precedent.
I’ve always understood the Koran as more a sort of constitutional document than specifying specific laws. Laws have been derived from it and different schools disagree, as do different Jewish schools (mostly Sharia Law is Old Testament Law) and as do countries that would class themselves as traditionally of ‘Christian’ law. But how much called ‘Christian’ can be found in the Gospels, whether it is influenced by the Roman and Orthodox churches or by ‘fundamentalists’ looking more to the unreformed Old Testament?
We assume that Jesus said ‘forgive your brother seventy times seven’ and ‘give to the poor’ and when a judge said Burn, heretic or hang for stealing bread to feed your children that was a judge in a ‘Christian’ land administering ‘Christian’ law. Likewise, Islamic (Sharia) Law may be as harsh as the Old Testament because so much of it is the Old Testament - but it has also been far more tolerant to dissent and other religions than Christianity ever was. Doesn’t make it wonderful but it does put it in context with the basis of all western law less than a hundred years ago, and with the extremists of both religions having more in common with each other than with more enlightened members of their religion.