Hadith Commentary as Discourse and Genre offers a systematic and interdisciplinary framework for analysing ḥadīth commentary, presenting two comprehensive models that approach the commentary tradition through discourse and genre analysis.

Drawing on twenty-five ḥadīth commentaries spanning the tenth century to the present and representing the major Sunni theological and legal schools, the book develops and empirically applies a wide range of methodological strategies for examining these scholarly-religious texts. It explores their discursive and generic features through methods including intertextuality, interdiscursivity, contextual analysis, rhetorical "move analysis", and lexico-grammatical analysis, among others. The two models are presented individually before being integrated into a practical framework for studying the Islamic commentary tradition. While centred on ḥadīth, the approach can also be applied to commentary literature in other areas of Islamic studies, including tafsīr, jurisprudence, theology, and Sufism, and offers new perspectives on contemporary debates surrounding the interpretation of the Prophet's sunna.

This book will appeal to students and scholars of Hadith and Islamic studies, Islamic intellectual history, religious studies, discourse analysis, and genre studies, as well as researchers interested in Islamic hermeneutics and traditions of commentary.

Mustafa Macit Karagözoğlu is a professor of Hadith at Marmara University, Turkey. He received his PhD with an analysis of the classical Arabic literature on weak hadith transmitters (ḍuʿafā) in 2013. He conducted research at the University of California at Los Angeles in 2009-2010, at Georgetown University in 2015-2016, and at Hamburg University in 2024-2025. His work is primarily focused on hadith literature and criticism, and their perception in contemporary Muslim discourses. He has published articles and book chapters on hadith and hadith commentary in various publications such as Journal of Islamic Studies, Die Welt des Islams, and The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to the Hadith.

Nurullah Ardıç is a professor of Sociology at Istanbul Technical University (PhD: UCLA, 2009). His areas of interest include Historical Sociology, Religion and Politics in West Asia, Sociology of Muslim Societies, Historical-Comparative Methods, and Discourse and Genre Analyses. He has published four books (one titled Islam and the Politics of Secularism (Routledge, 2012), edited two books, and published peer-reviewed articles on these topics in such journals as Journal of Islamic Studies, Journal of Historical Sociology, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, IJMES, Asian Journal of Social Science, and Turkish Studies Review.