Joel BlecherJoel Blecher is Associate Professor of History at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, the author of Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2018), and co-translator of bn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s Merits of the Plague (Penguin Classics, 2023). His other writings have appeared in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Islamic Law & Society, Oriens, and several edited volumes. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Library of Congress, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Read More Read Less