Badr ad-Din al-Ayni and Umdat al-Qari

Badr ad-Din Abu Muhammad Mahmud ibn Ahmad al-Ayni was born in 762 AH in Ayntab, a city in what is now southern Turkey, from which his nisba is derived. He became one of the most eminent scholars of the ninth century of the Islamic calendar, rising to positions of great prestige in Ottoman Egypt — he served as chief Hanafi judge of Egypt and as a trusted associate of the sultans of his era. His scholarly output was prolific and covered the full range of the Islamic sciences, but it is his great commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, Umdat al-Qari Sharh Sahih al-Bukhari, that has secured his immortality in the Islamic scholarly tradition.

Umdat al-Qari — The Pillar of the Reader — is the great Hanafi commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, standing alongside the Shafi'i commentary of Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (Fath al-Bari) as one of the two supreme masterpieces of Bukhari scholarship. The two works were composed in roughly the same period — both scholars lived in Mamluk Egypt in the ninth century — and the relationship between them was marked by a famous scholarly rivalry that produced both great learning and occasional polemics. Al-Ayni's commentary is longer than Fath al-Bari, running to over twenty-five volumes in modern editions, and it approaches the text from the Hanafi perspective with a rigor and comprehensiveness that has made it the definitive Hanafi reading of the canonical collection.

Al-Ayni brought to the composition of Umdat al-Qari not only his vast learning in the Hanafi legal tradition but also deep expertise in the Arabic language, the hadith sciences, and the historical and biographical scholarship that were essential for serious commentary work. His linguistic discussions are among the most thorough available for the text of Sahih al-Bukhari, and his historical notes on the Companions, the early jurists, and the cities and places mentioned in the hadiths are consistently illuminating.

Al-Ayni died in 855 AH, having completed a commentary that would be studied alongside Fath al-Bari in madrasas across the Islamic world for the following five centuries. The rivalry between the two works has been productive for scholarship: each commentary includes critiques of the other's positions that, read together, give students a rich picture of the interpretive possibilities within a single canonical text.