Commentary waits for the funeral

Claim (verbatim)

Commentary waits for the funeral. This connects the sharh economy with scholarly etiquette and market timing. A living author could still revise, still answer objections, still teach the text as its living oracle; glossing another man's matn during his lifetime was both presumptuous and commercially premature, since the commentary market opens only when the text has entered curricula and the author can no longer serve as its own commentary. First commentaries by other hands should therefore cluster in the generation after the author's death, and lifetime commentary by outsiders should be rare, with authors' own auto-commentaries the exception that proves the etiquette.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For matns with at least three known commentaries, the distribution of the interval from the matn author's death to the first non-authorial commentary has its mode between 0 and +40 years, and fewer than 10% of first non-authorial commentaries were begun before the author's death (auto-commentaries excluded from both counts). Primary clause: the under-10% share of lifetime first commentaries; the verdict follows it. Secondary: the modal window of 0 to 40 years.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: OpenITI metadata and the KITAB project's book-relations data, which record sharh relations together with author death dates across the corpus.

Novelty / leakage triage

no prior located yet (provisional)

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it.

[Independent blind re-audit 2026-07-08 (2nd pass, generator-independent), confidence medium. Double-confirmed: both the provisional pass and this re-audit located no prior formulation of the specific operationalized claim.] The sharh/matn commentary economy and its etiquette are well described qualitatively (El Shamsy, Asad Ahmed and others on the post-classical commentary culture; the matn-sharh-hashiya hierarchy), and KITAB records sharh book-relations with author death dates. But I found no quantitative study of the specific TIMING claim: that for matns with >=3 commentaries, the interval from the matn author's death to the first non-authorial commentary has its mode in 0-40 years and that <10% of first non-authorial commentaries were begun in the author's lifetime (auto-commentaries excluded). The etiquette is discussed; the death-to-first-commentary interval distribution is, as far as I found, not measured.

• Asad Q. Ahmed & others on post-classical Islamic commentary culture (matn/sharh/hashiya)
• OpenITI / KITAB book-relations metadata recording sharh relations with author death dates

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.