Dr. Shuaib Ally

Shuaib Ally is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. He works on reconstructing intellectual history through the Arabic-Islamic written scholarly heritage, specifically classical commentaries on the Qurʾān (tafsīr) and Arabic literary theory and linguistics (balāgha). His current project is on the practice of super-commentary writing (ḥāshiya) in tafsīr. He is examining how knowledge was produced and organized in the margins of manuscripts through a study of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī’s 17th C Ḥāshiya on Bayḍāwī’s popular Qurʾān commentary, Anwār al-tanzīl (Lights of Revelation). His PhD (University of Toronto, 2022) was about past and present anxieties over the loss of scholarly classics. He focused specifically on the Dalāʾil al-iʿjāz(Markers of Inimitability) of the 11th C ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, the most influential classical book in the discipline of balāgha. His project traced the historical transmission and scholarly use of this allegedly lost work through paratextual evidence in its extant manuscript tradition.