A marginal note or annotation in an Arabic or Hebrew manuscript, typically providing commentary or explanation of the main text.
From Arabic 'hashiya' meaning 'margin' or 'edge,' related to 'hasha' meaning 'side.' This term is specific to Islamic and Jewish scholarly traditions where margin notes were crucial to textual interpretation.
Medieval Islamic and Jewish scholars developed incredibly sophisticated systems of marginal annotation that were basically the original 'comment threads'—scholars would respond to previous commentators in the margins, creating layers of conversation across centuries.
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