Download PDF | Islamic Piety in Medieval Syria_ Mosques, Cemeteries and Sermons Under the Zangids and Ayyubids (1146-1260)
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to begin the pleasant task of acknowledgements by expressing deep gratitude to my erstwhile teachers, the late Hava Lazarus-Yafeh and Nehemia Levtzion, and to Beni Kedar (may he live and prosper). The training they provided me at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has inspired my work in many ways. My thanks also to Michael Cook, who served as my mentor while on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton (1999-2000), and to Stephen R. Humphreys, for the tutorial he conducted at the workshop of the Summer Academy of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, in September 2000.
My appreciation is extended to the colleagues and friends who listened to my ideas and shared with me thoughts and bibliographical references over the years: Reuven Amitai, Elisheva Baumgarten, Daphna Ephrat, Jackie Feldman (who also did the language editing), Miriam Frenkel, Stephen Heidemann, Nimrod Hurvitz, Ora Limor, Nimrod Luz, Shaun Marmon, Johannes Pahlitzsch and Sarah Stroumza. I have especially profited from the generosity and erudition of Yehoshua Frenkel and Yaakov Lev.
I am very much indebted to Michael Winter, who willingly read the whole manuscript, and strongly encouraged me to publish it. The support of David Shulman and Guy Stroumsa also helped. Amalia Zomeno-Rodrigez, Muhammad al-Atawneh and Dan Caner offered help with proof-reading, Lorenz Korn allowed me to use his maps, and Dror Heller and Roni Bluestein re-drew them for this book. Hagit Ezra prepared the index. The Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies & Diplomacy awarded me financial assistance for copy editing. Shafiq Abouzayd allowed me to include excerpts from my article “Graves, Relics and Sanctuaries: the Evolution of Syrian Sacred Topography,” forthcoming in ARAM 19 (2007): 601-620.” Ashgate Publishing gave me permission to include excerpts from my article “Islamic Preaching in Syria during the Counter-Crusade (twelfth-thirteenth centuries),” forthcoming in In Laudem Hierosolymitani: Studies in Crusades and Medieval Culture in Honour of Benjamin Z. Kedar, ed. 1. Shagrir, R. Ellenblum and J. Riley-Smith (Ashgate 2008). The communications with Brill Press were pleasant and efficient owing to Ingeborg van der Laan and Wilma de Weert. I thank them all.
I am grateful to the staff and faculty of the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev for providing me with a friendly and stimulating working environment; and to my colleagues and hosts at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I had the good fortune to work during the last stages of this book. Thanks also to Estie, Shoshie E., Shoshie R. and Michal, the gracious librarians at the Oriental Reading Room of the National Library of Jerusalem, my window to the medieval Islamic world.
I owe a great debt to my husband, who took upon himself more than the fair share of our domestic responsibilities, enabling me to work on this seemingly never-ending project. His assistance with all the technical aspects of the production of a manuscript was indispensible. My mother, in-laws and aunt deserve credit for their helping hand as well. Finally, I thank Amit, Ayelet and Uri, who provided me with ample distractions, and taught me to cherish every hour of work.
INTRODUCTION
Islamic Piety in Medieval Syria is a study of a past Middle Eastern society—that of Bilad al-Sham—present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the West Bank, in the Zangid and Ayyubid period.' The reconstruction of the religious beliefs and practices of members of that society, as undertaken in this book, entailed both the study of the works of its jurisconsults, preachers, and theologians, as well as an ethnography of its ‘living faith’. In my imagination, I embarked upon a virtual voyage into the cities, provincial towns and villages of mid-twelfth to mid-thirteenth century Syria, for long spans of ‘fieldwork’, aspiring to attain some intimacy with the texture of medieval Muslim piety. Drawing on a large collection of works from the copious literary production of that society, a much smaller treasury of documents from its private and public archives, and the many remnants of the architectural and artistic output of its artisans, I chose to concentrate on the arenas that stood at the heart of religious life, and were attended by all: common men and women, members of the ruling military and administrative elites, scholars and religious functionaries, merchants and farmers. Their gatherings in mosques, attendance at popular assemblies of exhortation, visits to cemeteries, and pilgrimages to sacred shrines are the subject of the chapters of this book.
This specific scheme seeks to treat the religious life of all classes and groups simultaneously, and to capture the religious experiences, liturgical calendars, spiritual leadership and communal organization of the unlettered classes (al-‘dmma, al-‘awadmm, al-nds) in interaction with those of the educated elite (al-khdssa, al-khawass). It is an attempt to avoid the dichotomous model, the a priori positioning of the religion of the learned elite against the religion of the masses, and the construction of an official, normative, orthodox version of religion, opposed to a popular, heterodox, folk version. It focuses on hybrid religious orientations, and on the processes through which the norms of religious life were negotiated among various groups, and were constructed and disseminated in society.
I have chosen to concentrate on the institutions that were open to all believers rather than on those designed primarily for ‘professionals’. As is well known, in formal settings such as mosques, funerals and assemblies of exhortation, expressions of piety may be highly formalized, even routinized, and dependent upon communal gathering. But the same formal settings may also be the site of lone individual acts of devotion, sometimes highly informal and unstructured.’ Needless to say, spontaneous outbursts of religious feeling, and expressions of love, praise (hamd), and submission to God, can take place in other settings as well. No separate chapters are devoted to the madrasa or the Sufi khdnqah (though they appear many times in my work), despite the significance of those institutions in the religious life of the medieval Middle East. In Syria, the popularization of the madrasa, so eloquently presented by Jonathan Berkey, in the last chapter of his Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo,* seems to have occurred, if at all, after the Mamluk take-over. As to Sufi lodges—ribats, zawiyas and khanqahs—there is little evidence of life within their walls, or of their influence on society at large, although our sources portray many individual Sifts and their interaction with other elements in society. The regrettable absence of chapters on religiosity at the marketplace and the private home is due to the dearth of relevant source material.
The first part of the book, following this introduction, concentrates on mosques in sixth/twelfth-seventh/thirteenth century Syria: the renowned pilgrimage centers of Jerusalem, the important congregational mosques and educational centers of Damascus and Aleppo, obscure neighborhood mosques, tiny oratories, and peripheral village mosques. It commences with a survey of mosques and their founders, an assessment of mosque attendance, and an analysis of the motivations of mosque builders and mosque goers. The makeup of congregations that assembled together in mosques, and the mechanisms by which these institutions were administered, are discussed at some length. The following sections deal with the manifold functions of mosques. Besides their obvious function as prayer-houses, mosques served as educational institutions, social-political ‘forums’, refuges for the poor and homeless, seats of gadis, podiums for the deliverance of official messages and the dissemination of information, meeting places for Sufis and scholars, retreats for ascetics, reliquariums and holy shrines. Some of those functions were contested, reflecting the ongoing tension between the aspiration to ‘sanctify’ the mosque and guard its purity on the one hand, and the dictum of the social and spiritual needs of society on the other hand. Moreover, both topically and geographically, the mosque was the site of debates over sunna (the proper, traditional way) versus bid‘a (unwarranted innovation), and negotiations over contested liturgical practices and questionable modes of behavior.
Chapter three is devoted to prayer leaders (imams) and preachers of the mosque sermons (khafibs). It attempts to draw their profiles and explore their relationships with their clients and patrons within various social settings. The contents, manners and methods of preaching, and the involvement of preachers and prayer leaders in current affairs and in the lives of congregations are investigated and interpreted in the historical context of the Crusading period, and Zangid and Ayyubid rule.
Chapter four deals with the assembly of exhortation (majlis alwa‘z), which drew great and diverse audiences to mosques and other public spaces, weekly, or on special occasions. The descriptions of such assemblies in the medieval sources, and the few extant texts of exhortations, reveal the religious perceptions, political tensions, and expressions of piety of that age. They also illuminate the complex relationships between rulers, scholars, and the wider public. Contrary to prevalent images of popular preachers, wu“‘az in Ayyubid Syria were respectable members of the religious elite, with close ties to rulers. The figure and career of Sibt ibn al-Jawzi (d. 654/1256), the greatest Syrian preacher of the first decades of the thirteenth century, his discourse and his manner of exhortation are presented in detail.
Part two shifts to the arenas of the cemetery, mausoleum and shrine. Chapter five examines funerary rites, burial, commemoration, mourning, beliefs and customs associated with the visitation of graves, as well as the diverse scholarly debates over them. Drawing upon many anecdotes from the medieval sources, and upon insights provided by the vast scholarly literature, it sketches a nuanced portrait of the ties bonding the living and the dead. The careful study of the ceremonies that took place on the way to the cemetery and on its grounds renders the means by which unity and social solidarity were constructed, but also exposes social tensions, deviations from conventional modes of behavior, and conflicts between religious ideals and social norms.
Chapter six seeks to explain the place of the mausoleum (turba) and commemorative shrine (maqam, mashhad) in medieval Syrian landscape and culture. It deals with the growing popularity of the visitation of sanctified graves—rediscovered ancient graves of Qur’anicbiblical figures and of companions of the Prophet (sahdba), as well as newly dug graves of various shaykhs, scholars and martyrs, and sacred places. It surveys the geographical spread of shrines, the dynamics of the establishment and renovations of new shrines, and the emergence of the narratives supporting the specifically Islamic sanctity of sites that had formerly been (or, were simultaneously) identified with other religious traditions.
Part three is an endeavor to articulate the perceptions of piety, impiety and religious dissent, as understood by medieval Muslims of Syria. Chapter seven draws the ideal types of pious rulers, scholars and commoners, male and female, and highlights conflicting visions of perfect devotion to God in Zangid and Ayyubid society. It also suggests that moderate Sufism and Hanbali activism, two powerful trends at the time, had a profound influence on the perceptions and the practices of contemporaries. Chapter eight analyzes the vocabulary and discourse used in our sources to define impiety and dissent from established religious norms. It draws attention to a range of trends and phenomena that remained at the margins of the central arenas: the so-called zindiqs (heretics), antinomian Sifts and unruly ascetics, plebeian miracle-workers, astrologers, self-proclaimed prophets, certain theologians and philosophers. As their own voices are rarely heard, the perspective is, inevitably, that of mainstream scholars, reflecting their strategies of coping with challenging sources of authority and with deviation from established norms.
Appendix I is a tentative calendar of personal and public religious activity in twelfth-thirteenth century Syria: rituals conducted in daily, weekly and annual cycles, lifecycle rites and official statecelebrations.
Appendix II supplies maps and dynastic tables.
The index includes short definitions of the many Arabic terms used in this book, so it may serve as a basic glossary as well.
Historical Background
Around the middle of the sixth/twelfth century, for the first time since the fall of the Umayyads in 132/750, Damascus became once again the capital of a vast Muslim state, and retrieved its long-lost military importance and religious prestige. This new era in Syrian history followed the anarchy and chaos of the tenth and eleventh centuries, when Syria became a battleground for Fatimids, Seljuks, Byzantines, petty local urban forces and tribal groups.* Towards the end of 490/1097 the armies of the first Crusade arrived in the Middle East, and by 524/1130 a vast Christian kingdom had formed, stretching from Diyarbakr in the northeast, to the borders of Egypt in the south. The Syrian cities of the interior—Aleppo, Hamah, Hims, Ba‘labakk and Damascus—remained under Muslim rule. There, the Islamic counter-crusade, or jihdd movement arose, accompanied by a series of campaigns for the unification of Syria into a single political entity. Nur al-Din, the second son of the former Seljuk atdabeg of Mosul Aq Sunqir Zangi (r. 521/1127—541/1146), was its first major leader. Medieval Muslim historians eulogize Nur al-Din not only for his devotion to his military mission and struggle against the infidels from without, but also for his exceptionally just rule, personal piety, and support for Islam within.°
Saladin, a freeborn Kurdish general in the army of Nir al-Din Zangi acquired control over Fatimid Egypt in 565/1171 (when still in the service of his master) and subsequently consolidated his rule over most of Muslim Syria and the Jazira. The Latin domains became the target of his ensuing military campaigns. During the 1180’s he regained almost all of the formerly Islamic territory; the Frankish cavalry was crushed at Hittin and Jerusalem was triumphantly retrieved for Islam. By 584/1188 only Frankish Tyre, Tripoli and Antioch held out. Shortly thereafter, however, the forces of the Third Crusade, headed by Richard Lion-Heart, reestablished the Latin presence along the major part of the Syro-Palestinian coast, to pose a constant military and moral challenge to the princes of the Ayyubid confederation.
Syrian unity was very short lived. Upon his death in 589/1193, Saladin bequeathed the empire he had painstakingly put together to seventeen of his sons, brothers and nephews, who had previously served him as army-generals and administrators. They all became princes in a confederation of autonomous principalities of varied size and importance. In subsequent generations, the cohesion of this confederation depended, to a large extent, on the authority of the reigning head of the clan, who was usually situated in Cairo. He was the only prince to formally carry the title ‘sultan’ (sultan). His other special prerogatives included the vow of alliance, the striking of coins in his name, and the mention of his name in Friday noon sermons throughout the Ayyibid domains.® The rulers of other principalities usually used the title malik (pl. mulik). Constantly shifting alliances, conflicting interests and a very mobile, mostly free-born and at least partially independent military elite undermined the confederation’s stability.’ Individual rulers occasionally pursued their interests by contracting with the Franks, the Khwarizmians, the Seljuks and the Mongols—against their siblings. But other forces worked to moderate inter-Ayyubid conflicts, and end them, more often than not, in agreements and territorial adjustments. These included external threats, the interest in stability of the caliph in Baghdad and of local forces, intermarriage and familial solidarity. As for the relationship with the Franks, Saladin’s heirs usually preferred peaceful co-existence and rehabilitation to continued crusades and jihdd. The final overthrow of Frankish rule in Palestine was to come only at the end of the seventh/thirteenth century, at the hand of the Mamliks.
Rebels from within the Ayyibid army, and powerful enemies from without, put an end to the confederation. In 648/1250, in Cairo, Mamluk conspirators murdered the son and heir of al-Salih Ayytib (r. in Egypt 637/1240—647/1249), the Ayyubid sultan who had made mamliks, mostly of Kipchak-Turkish ancestry, the principal support of his rule. In Syria, the Ayyubid lord of Aleppo al-Nasir Yusuf II held on for another decade, until the Mongol invasion. At that stage (the end of 657/1259), the Ayytibids were too divided and irresolute to put up a fight. Their kingdom was effectively incorporated into the Mamltk Sultanate by Baybars,* and by 658/1260 only one principality, that of Hamah in northern Syria, remained in the hands of an Ayyubid prince.’
Notwithstanding the frequent inner friction, the ongoing confrontation with the Crusades, and the occasional clashes with the Khwarizmians, the Armenians, the rulers of Seljuk Rim and local rebels—the Zangid and Ayyubid periods brought recovery and economic expansion. All in all, it was a period of restoration, renewal and growth. Changes in the igtad‘ system'® led to greater investment in agriculture, the reclamation of uncultivated land, and an increase in production. Ayyibid sultans such as al-‘Adil and al-Kamil minted dirhams on a large scale. Commercial relations with Italians and control over ports in Egypt and Yemen lent prosperity to Syria." Towns grew and were provided with a legion of new caravansaries, markets, waterworks, fortifications and religious institutions, some of them in innovative architectural and artistic style.'? Most of the medieval monuments that still adorn Damascus and Aleppo date from this period in its history.’
Stephen Humphreys points out several trends in the development of the Ayyubid confederation. In the twelfth century the local Syrian elite was still influential in the administration, the religious establishment, and even in the army. In the course of the thirteenth century the army grew in size, and its political power increased at the expense of civilian forces. Freeborn men of the local population were pushed out of the military and the bureaucracy, but remained active in jihad propaganda, and as agents of Sunni revivalism.'* The ahdath—an urban militia or brotherhood of men who assumed the safeguarding of their city (often from the central government)—almost disappeared from the Syrian landscape in Zangid and Ayyubid times. Claude Cahen surmises that their roles were divided up between professional emirs and ‘ulamd’. The latter indeed held central roles in the Ayyubid principalities, not only in the religious establishment, but also in the bureaucratic system and at the court. Several scholars, amongst them George Makdisi, Ira Lapidus and Joan Gilbert, noted the growth, empowerment and professionalization of ‘ulama between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries.'°
The ‘sunni reaction’ that began with the Seljuk conquest of Syria was completed in Damascus, according to the estimation of Jean-Michel Mouton, by 549/1154. Persecution, culminating with the massacre of Isma‘Ilis in 523/1129, and the loss of all prestigious political and religious offices to Sunnis, promoted Shi‘Is to leave the city.'® Yet, the Muslim populace of Syria, especially that of northern Syria at that time, must have included a sizable Imami and Isma‘tli Shi community, as well as Nusayri and Druze groups. The Sunnis were divided into adherents of the four schools of law, supporters of at least two opposing theological doctrines (with various shades of each), and a large and mobile immigrant population. The relations among the law schools were rather peaceful during most of the Zangid and Ayyubid period. The occasional skirmishes and exchanges of insults between Hanafis and Shafi‘ls, or Shafids and Hanbalis, were a far cry from the violent fitnas that had disrupted life in the cities of Iran and Iraq from the tenth to the twelfth century. Moderate Sufi asceticism and Hanbali activism became powerful intellectual and social currents; they achieved acceptance and even respect from Sunni ‘ulamd’, and earned the patronage of rulers,'’ and were gradually incorporated into mainstream Islam. Sufism had a wide spectrum of expressions in twelfth-thirteenth century Syria. Alongside the great Sufi theoreticians Ibn al-‘Arabi and Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi, we find zuhhad—pious men who combined mild asceticism with careers in the religious or political establishments, ascetics and mystics who retreated to special Sufi institutions, secluded themselves in mosques, or chose a life of homeless wandering, groups of aspiring mystics huddled around their shaykh; and the radical muwallahs—‘fools for God’—who totally rejected society and normative Islam.
Despite the foreign origins and military preoccupations of the Zangids and Ayyubids, they were not only well integrated into local culture, but exerted a significant impact upon it. Whether constructed as a discourse of power and legitimization, or as a program of religious renewal, Nur al-Din, Saladin, and their followers, raised the banner of ihy@ al-sunna (the revivification of the sunna),'* or izhar al-din wa-imdtat al-bida‘ (rendering the sunna victorious and killing-off innovations), sometimes phrased also as nashr al-‘ilm wa-dahd albid‘a (propagating religious knowledge and refuting innovation).' At least some of them explicitly fostered a particular vision of Islam and Islamization. They extended massive patronage to religious institutions and scholars, selected in accordance with their personal preferences regarding school of law, theological orientation, or attitude towards the study of philosophy and the ‘ancient sciences’.” This, in contrast to the Mamliiks who succeded them, and were also generous patrons of scholars and religious institutions, but seem to have done so primarily in order to attain peace, stability and greater institutionalization. The equal treatment of the four schools of law, implied by the nomination of four head gddis by Baybars in 663/1265, and the erection of a growing number of madrasas that taught all four schools of laws under one roof, reflect this later tendency.”!
The relationship between the Ayyubid court and the rest of society can be picturesquely imagined like that between the court-citadel (the qal‘a) and the city surrounding it. The court-citadel emerged in the Middle East in the late eleventh century, only several decades prior to the arrival of the Ayyibids on the scene, to become the locale of government, the residence of the ruler and the seat of military and political power. Earlier, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, court complexes were usually built away from urban centers, following the model of Samarra.”” Although encompassed by walls, the Syrian court-citadel was organically tied to the city. Situated on a high spot, it could be seen from most parts of the city. It allowed the ruling class to separate itself from the bulk of the local population and protect itself from rebellions of city dwellers or military units, while maintaining interaction with the city and closely controlling it. A gate, which opened onto a wide thoroughfare leading to the congregational mosque and the major markets, usually connected the court-citadels to the city. Religious institutions situated within the citadel, mainly madrasas and shrines, formed a second link between the court and the rest of the city. In Aleppo, for example, the gal‘a encompassed three renovated shrines, and a mosque with a lofty minaret. The ensemble transmitted a triple message: Islam’s triumph over the Crusades, the religious commitment of the Ayyiibids, and the surveillance of the citadel over the city.7* The dwellers of the citadel often descended from it into the city for a variety of worldly and religious purposes, and while most city-dwellers probably never entered the citadel, some officials, merchants, artisans, ‘ulamd’ and Sufis certainly did, making the qgal‘a into a space of interaction between rulers and their subjects.”
Ayyubid princes usually enjoyed a fine command of Arabic. Saladin was renowned as a zealous enthusiast of Qur’an and hadith recitation, who “made those of his sons who happened to be present [at the performance of a professional narrator] as well as the mamliks on duty, listen to the traditions he recited.”*? Some of the later Ayyubid princes even nourished justified scholarly pretensions. Al-Malik al- Mu‘azzam (d. 624/12—27) is the prime example. Biographers extol his dedication to learning (and his humility), claiming that he would go by foot to the homes of his grammar and figh Gurisprudence) teachers, and carry with him on his travels and military campaigns a ten-volume compilation of Hanafi law, that he had ordered from one of his protégés. He composed a polemical treatise in defense of Abu Hanifa (the founder of the school of law he had adopted in adulthood and promoted fervently), a work that gave him the credentials necessary in order to be considered one of the ‘ulamda’.’® Al-Malik al-Muhsin Yamin al-Din, one of the younger sons of Saladin, “dressed himself in the garb of ahi al-‘ilm,” traveled to hear hadith-scholars in far-a-way cities, and transmitted hadith himself in the congregational mosque of Aleppo.?’ The historian and biographer al-Safadi (d. 764/1363) introduces al-Mu‘azzam’s son, al-Nasir Dawid b. ‘Isa of Karak, a man whose biography is replete with political feats, combats and changing fortunes, by formulas typical of the necrologies of ‘ulama@’. Al-Safadi begins the entry with a list of al-Nasir Dawtid’s teachers and the locales of his study, and ends it with a long poem (gasida) praising al-Nasir’s literary production. He also tells us that the prince was a collector of precious books, who was willing to spend thousands of dindrs on rare and beautiful volumes.”*
Most Zangid and Ayyubid princes were not religious scholars, of course, but patrons of religious scholarship. They followed the pattern of the Seljuks and Birids”’ in creating a symbiotic relationship with Sunni ‘ulama’. They repressed the Shi‘a, founded a legion of religious institutions, endowed wagqfs, and appointed the graduates of madrasas to official positions, determining the balance of power between the schools of law. Saladin, according to the estimate of his secretaries ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani and al-Qadi al-Fadil, supported no less than 600 jusrist, with the overall annual expenditure of 200,000—300,000 dindrs.*° Al-Manstir Muhammad I b. al-Muzaffar “Umar (r. 587/1191-617/1220-—21) lord of Hamah and neighboring towns, is said to have supported some 200 grammarians, jurists and other scholars.*! In return, he earned the support of the ‘ulama’, cadres for the state administration, legitimacy, and a positive image of men truly committed towards the religious law, and respectful of the authority of gadis (judges) and muftis (jurisconsults).*? So did other members of his dynasty. Official Ayyibid epigraphy crowns its princes with three attributes: God-given military victory, royal justice, and religious learning.** The titles most commonly used for designating commitment to religion include al-‘Alim (the learned), Nar al-Din (the light of religion), Salah al-Din (the restorer of religion), Rukn al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the support of Islam and Muslims). Some titles evoke struggle against dissenters and enemies from within: gadmi‘ (subjugator) al-khawarij, qahir al-mulhidin, or al-mutamarridin (subjugator of heretics or rebels), gatil al-kafara (fighter against infidels).** Nutr al-Din is quoted designating himself as a guardian recruited for the protection of the shari‘a (“nahnu shihan laha@’).*
An unprecedented building boom marked Zangid and Ayyubid rule. Fourteen madrasas were established in Syria and the Jazira under Nur al-Din. In Damascus alone, 85 new madrasas were established during the ninety years of Ayyubid rule, more than under any other dynasty of the region.*° Two new institutions—dar al-hadith (college for the study of Prophetic lore) and dar al-‘adl (the ‘palace of justice’, where the ruler redressed grievances submitted by his subjects)—were created.*’? Stephen Humphreys has documented 241 acts of construction sponsored by 174 different patrons in Damascus, 589/1193-658/1260.** No wonder that hundreds of posts became available for men of religious training. Many itinerant and emigrant teachers and students, amongst them refugees from al-Andalus, the Maghrib, and the eastern parts of the Muslim world, manned those posts.*? They made Damascus, Aleppo, and some minor Syrian towns, into cosmopolitan Muslim intellectual centers.*°
Sources
Nearly all Syrian chroniclers of the Ayytbid and Mamluk period were ‘uladma’ (rather than statesmen or civil bureaucrats, court historians, or members of the military elite). They seem to have been motivated by a genuine personal interest in history, primarily that of their region, a sense of duty to record the eventful decades of the crusading era, and especially—to preserve the information about the lives and achievements of fellow Muslim scholars. Most chroniclers formulated, in one way or another, their conviction that the work they were producing had an edifying purpose; that history teaches values and morals, that it should serve in the instruction of rulers and promote the unity of the wmma."!
The typical Syrian chronicle of the thirteenth century divides each year’s records into two nearly even sections: hawddith—a presentation of the most important events, and wafaydt—concise obituaries of the noteworthy people who had died during that year, especially ‘ulama’. Biographical dictionaries supply some lengthier and more intimate portraits of men (and a few women) of that era, along with numerous rather disappointingly curt accounts. When chroniclers and biographers relate events of their own times, and biographies of people they had known personally, they do not hesitate to add personal remarks and insert autobiographical material. With the additional tales and anecdotes (hikdydat), extraordinary facts (mu‘jibdt), and occasional critical remarks,” these works remain interesting and sometimes even entertaining till today. In order to avoid reproducing previous scholarship,** I will confine my review of the sources to a few short remarks on the chroniclers and authors of biographical dictionaries most significant for this book, before moving on to other relevant narrative and non-narrative sources.
The associative and eclectic chronicle of Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, Mir’ at al-Zaman fi-Ta@’rikh al-A‘yan, unfortunately still in a poorly edited version, is rich with detail on life in Syria, to which Sibt ibn al-Jawzi emigrated as an adult. He took great care to document his successful career as a popular preacher and intimate associate of some of the Ayyubid princes, weaving accounts of his personal life into the narrative.* His contemporary, the Damascene Abit Shama (d. 665/1267), considered as one of the best and most precise historians of his age, also allows us a glimpse of his personal life, beliefs and opinions, along with anecdotes and minor details about daily life in Damascus.” Another important work is al-Nawddir al-Sultaniyya wa-l-Mahasin al-Yusiifiyya—The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, written by Baha’ al-Din ibn Shaddad (d. 632/1235), a scholar from Mosul. He was appointed by Saladin as gddi al-‘askar (military judge) in 584/1188, and remained in the sultan’s service, maintaining a very close relationship with him until his death. This work not only provides an authoritative portrait of the sultan and his career (as a moralizing, even hagiographical work), it also presents a lucid vision of ideal piety, and some vivid details of religious life and education at the Ayyubid court.*° Another, later ‘“alim, who presents first-hand knowledge of Ayyubid history, especially of northern Syria, was Jamal al-Din ibn Wasil (d. 667/1285) of Hamah. He was closely related to the court, and served as diplomat, administrator, tutor and gadi under several Ayyubid rulers.*” His contemporary, ‘Izz al-Din ibn Shaddad (d. 684/1285) had also served in the Ayyubid chanceries, until compelled to flee from the Mongols to Cairo.** Ibn Shaddad’s al-A‘laq al-Khatira, a comprehensive topography and history of Syria and the Jazira, is particularly informative regarding religious architecture and the history of religious institutions. Together with sections dealing with urban topography in the earlier Ta’rikh al-Dimashq of Ibn ‘Asakir (d. 571/1176) and in the later compilations of al-Nu‘aymi (d. 927/1521) and Ibn Tuliin (d. 953/1546),” it supplies data regarding the establishment of mosques, madrasas, Sufi homes and sacred shrines. While the lacunas in these lists are often frustrating, they do provide a fair amount of data information.
Kamal al-Din ibn al-‘Adim (d. 660/1262), author of the rather concise chronicle Zubdat al-Halab fi Ta’rikh Halab and the voluminous biographical dictionary Bughyat al-Talab, which also focuses on his beloved Aleppo (defined within very generous borders)—probably enjoyed an even closer acquaintance with local life and politics. He was born in Aleppo, to a renowned and wealthy family of religious scholars and functionaries, and spent his life there. His lengthy quotations from non-extant sources add historiographical value to his work, but for our purposes his rich presentation of individuals from among his contemporaries is even more valuable. Ibn al-‘Adim’s intellectual curiosity is nicely illustrated in an anecdote concerning an investigation he conducted on an ancient inscription he had spotted in a madrasa in Damascus. He interrogated a mudarris who used to live there, and found out that it was a eulogy of Diocletianus, inscribed in Greek. He then searched for information about that last Roman emperor, and summarized it for his readers.*° Ibn al-‘Adim, who liked to travel and to spend time in his family’s summer resort in one of the villages in Northern Syria, shares with us some observations regarding life in rural areas and popular pilgrimage sites.*!
But it is Diya’ al-Din al-Maqdisi al-Hanbali (569/1173—643/1245) who brings us as close as an ‘dlim can get us to medieval Muslim villagers. His hagiographical dictionary The Cited Tales of the Wondrous Doings of the Shaykhs of the Holy Land was composed in Damascus. It is replete with quotations of relatives and neighbors who had emigrated from the villages of Mt. Nablus to Damascus only several years prior to his birth. Diya’ al-Din al-Maqdisi himself is frequently quoted by later biographers, thus inadvertently adding to the ‘over-representation’ of Hanbalis in our sources. Another compilation of biographical, or rather hagiographical sketches of people personally known to the author, was the work of Safi al-Din ibn Abi al-Mansir (d. 682/1283), a Sufi from Alexandria, who spent several years in Damascus. His profiles of fellow Sufis he had met during a lifetime of wandering offers an exceptionally intimate glimpse of Sufi life in the thirteenth century.” But all in all, historiographical sources provide a very partial, fragmented picture of religious life and attitudes.
From the huge literary output of the theologians, jurists, mystics, educators and professional admonishers of the Zangid and Ayyubid period, I chose to consult a number of works. These include legal compositions representative of all four schools of law, anti-bida‘ manuals, hisba treatises, devotional tracts, and collections of fatwas. The latter genre seems to be especially promising as a source on socio-religious phenomena. True, the queries are usually posed in general terms (using the standard fictional ‘Zayd’ and ‘‘Amr’, or simply ‘a man’, ‘a woman’), thus distancing the discussion from the particular circumstances of the questioner. The answers are often laconic; devoid of reasoning and debate with other opinions and citations from earlier sources. But more often than not, seem realistic enough,** and even if some are not responses to concrete questions of real people, but rather, a didactic device used by the author in order to clarify a hypothetical legal issue—fatwds collections undoubtedly reflect something of the reality and mentality of their times.“
The main compilations used in this book include the collections of fatwas of three prominent Shafids: ‘Izz al-Din ibn ‘Abd al-Salam al-Sulami (660/1262), Ibn al-Salah al-Shahraziri (d. 643/1245) and Abii Zakariyya’ al-Nawawi (d. 676/1276). ‘Izz al-Din al-Sulami was an outstanding scholar: a mujtahid who did not hesitate to cross the boundaries of madhhab, a theologian who did not bend his Ash‘ari principles even when, in a certain constellation, they became unpopular, and a daring critic of rulers and moral laxity and lack of zeal for jihdd. He was a mudarris, qddi, khatib and mufti.> A\-Shahraziri is primarily regarded as a hadith expert, being the author of a comprehensive work on all branches of the study of hadith known as the Muqaddima. At the pinnacle of his career he was nominated to be the first headmaster of Dar al-Hadith al-Ashrafiyya.°° Al-Nawawi, likewise reputable in his times and till this very day, also wrote about hadith, but his more important work is on Shafi'l figh. Contemporaries describe all three jurisconsults as inclined to mild asceticism,*’ if not outright Sufism, an inclination evident in their fatwds as well. In al-Sulami’s collection, for example, supererogatory works (nawafil) receive wide coverage. Besides his large scholarly compilations on figh and hadith, he composed short devotional treatises, such as Kitab al-Adhkdr (a collection of invocations for all occasions), or Magqasid al-Salat (The Purports of Prayer) that were most likely written for ordinary believers and popular audiences. Al-Nawawi’s Kitab al-Arba‘in (a collection of forty hadith to memorize) may be seen in the same light. He is presented by Pouzet as a typical ‘alim of his age: “un esprit moins original que traditionnel, plus ascéte que ‘mystique’ de haut vol, moins créateur que vulgarisateur d’un acquis fidélement recueilli et conserve pieusement.”** His biographers claim that he was totally devoted to his teaching and scholarship, and never married.*?
For the historian, anti-bida‘ treatises and hisba manuals raise dilemmas similar to those raised by fatwas, as certain lively descriptions that the naive reader might easily consider as eye-witness evidence may be found almost verbatim, in considerably earlier works. Moreover, these works are, by definition, prone to exaggeration and profuse rhetoric. Yet, Abt Shama’s Kitab al-Ba‘ith ‘ala Inkar al-Bida‘ wa-l-Hawddith is a rather moderate example of this genre, compellingly embedded in the author’s time and place. Abi Shama lectures most passionately against customs that his contemporaries mistakenly take for pious acts—from minute details of the conventions of Qur’an recitation, to the installation of innovative prayers in congregational mosques. Hisba manuals, intended for the instruction of muhtasib (the supervisor of public morals, better known as ‘market inspector’) contain equally lively descriptions of disreputable practices. The conspicuous absence of the actual activities of muhtasibs from contemporaneous chronicles and biographical dictionaries, however, again arouses the suspicion that much of the material is merely theoretical. Still, Nihayat al-Rutba fi Talab al-Hisba by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Shayzari (d. 589/1193), the earliest guide for the muhtasib known from the Muslim east (al-Shayzari probably resided in Tiberias and Aleppo), seems to convey some interesting features of contemporary religious life.*' So too does a lengthy certificate of appointment of a muhtasib, preserved in a guidebook for the study of rhetoric: al-Mathal al-S@ir by Diya’ al-Din Ibn al-‘Athir (d. 637/1239). Whether the document was indeed used at the time of Saladin for the appointment of a muhtasib, or merely for the study of the rhetorical device of itnab (exaggeration), I cannot but agree with Ignaz Goldziher that the text is well worth the attention of the social-historian.”
A travelogue, guides for pilgrims, personal memoirs and a book about the underworld are some other sources that contain interest-ing representations of society and religion in twelfth century Syria. The Rihla of Ibn Jubayr (d. 614/1217) is an intelligent personal account of a Maghribi traveler who spent some time in Syria in 580/1184, and observed with curiosity the habitat and the habits of its population. Kitab al-Isharat fi Ma‘rifat al-Ziyardat, probably the first guide for pilgrimage in Bilad al-Sham, was composed by Abi Bakr ‘Ali al-Harawi (d. 611/1215), known to his contemporaries as ‘the wandering ascetic’ (al-zahid al-s@ih). It is a most important source for the reconstruction of the sacred topography and sacred history of Bilad al-Sham, and of the debates concerning the sanctity of places. Kitab al-Isharat stands out as a work singularly devoted to pilgrimage sites, but there are similar guides in large works such as Ibn al-‘Adim’s Bughyat al-Talab and Ibn Shaddad’s al-A‘laq al-Khatira.* A Jewish guide for pilgrims, Elleh ha-Masa‘ot, also composed around the middle of the thirteenth century, offers some supplementary information on tombs of patriarchs and righteous men visited by the Muslim devout.
Two very different works that discuss medieval professions, their essence and their image, should be mentioned here as well, as they devote chapters to professions tied to the religious establishment. Subki’s Mu‘id al-Niqam is a short fourteenth century compendium on careers and occupations of sorts; Zayn al-Din ‘Abd al-Rahim alJawbari’s al-Mukhtar fi Kashf al-Asrar (composed between 619/1222 and 629/1232) is a humoristic lexicon of fann al-nawdmis—the art of the sly and cunning who pretend to be men of religion, prophets, exorcists and fortunetellers.“ Finally, there are several archival and epigraphic sources: some personal letters and documents such as waqfiyyas (acts of endowment) and hajj-certificates from the treasury of the Umayyad Mosque,® reproductions of documents in narrative and didactic works, inscriptions on monumental buildings and on epitaphs in cemeteries, and audience certificates (samd‘at). The latter record, usually on the front page of the text, the names of the teachers and students attending a particular reading or lecture, its location and its date; information which may provide insights into the social aspects of the transmission of knowledge and the popularity and paths of dissemination of texts.°”
Methodological Approach
My research assumes that major aspects of the life of medieval society, the religious aspect in particular, may indeed be retrieved and reconstructed from the texts which constitute the source material for this work. The data, however, must be processed with the aid of discourse analysis, in order to decipher the means of expression and representation, and take us beyond the simplistic collection of facts (or what seem to be facts). The integration of those two approaches—namely, the positivistic reconstruction of the ways through which twelfththirteenth century Muslims actively expressed their commitment to Islam, and the deciphering of the discourse by which piety and impiety were constructed in the literature produced by the members of that society—was one of the challenges of this work.
As the main thrust of the book is to deepen our understanding of the beliefs and practices reported by medieval authors within their specific time and place—the application of additional methodological tools was imperative. Some fine works on other historical societies provided me with models to aspire to. Peter Burke’s essays in his programmatic History and Social Theory (1993) taught me the advantages of eclectic borrowing from the methodologies of social history and historical anthropology.® Aaron Gurevich’s essay “Historical anthropology and the science of history” (1988) encourages to “ask an alien culture questions it did not ask itself,” to apply new research methods to the study of known sources. He also calls to pay attention to the influence of the religious and cultural needs of the masses on the official religious, rather then “look mainly for the spread of cultural models from the top to wider sections of society.”” I greatly benefited from Peter Brown’s analyses of the dynamic and fluid nature of religious phenomena in late antiquity, and from Patrick Geary’s studies of society and religion in early medieval Europe.” I found S.D. Goitein’s imaginative treatment of social history in Jewish societies contemporaneous with ‘my’ Muslim society, and his observations on the surrounding Muslim world, particularly enlightening.’ I was also influenced by insights of Giles Constable regarding preaching; by Elhanan Reiner’s and Yoram Bilu’s works on pilgrimage, and by Nisan Rubin’s approach to death rites.”
Several book-length studies and numerous articles deal with the history of Syria in the Zangid and Ayyubid period. I have often relied on Stephen Humphreys’ wonderfully detailed From Saladin to the Mongols (1977), and on Louis Pouzet’s Damas au VII°/XIIT’ siécle (1986): a thick and lively description of religious institutions and schools, scholarly families, the curriculum of religious studies, minority groups and everyday life. Chamberlain’s Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus (1994) challenged me with its daring reinterpretation of society and culture in the medieval Middle East. Works that place at the center of their inquiry the religious experience of the individual, rather than power relations, have inspired my approach more significantly, however. Consequently, I have devoted more attention to communal rites and their tacit meaning, functions and aims, and to theological concepts, than to social competition. Two works especially sensitive in this regard are The Transmission of Knowledge in Late Medieval Cairo (Princeton, 1992) by Jonathan Berkey, and Christopher Taylor’s In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Saints in Late Medieval Egypt (Leiden, 1998).
As is well known, medieval chroniclers, whose main fields of interest were political and dynastic history, do not readily volunteer information about religious practices and beliefs, let alone those of men of humbler social classes, women and children, marginal groups and rural areas. Biographers were primarily interested in the ‘ulama@ (even though rulers, emirs, merchants, Stifis and eccentrics do enter their works). Geographical treatises, chronicles and biographical dictionaries, travelogues, hagiographical works, fatwds, anti-bida‘ treatises, sermons, and other didactic manuals were all written by learned men, who did not necessarily understand the voices of commoners properly, even if they did take the trouble to listen to them and record them. Moreover, some of them wrote about commoners with the intent of reforming their practices, or doing away with them altogether. Yet, I agree with Jonathan Berkey’s observation that in the medieval Middle East the lines separating one social group from another were porous, and that literacy was not a clear-cut mark of differentiation. There were varying degrees of literacy, and many, at least in urban centers, were exposed to some maktab-education.” Mutatis mutandis, Gurevich’s reminder that “many genres of medieval didactic literature were written for the Church flock and that on both the form and content of this literature there remains the imprint of a kind of ‘pressure’ this audience imposed on learned authors” is applicable to our case. All in all, my contention is that we can succeed in capturing some of the seemingly mute voices of medieval Muslim society in the sources we do possess, and attempt to explain their expressions of piety. The main strategies here are to cover as large and varied a corpus of literature possible, and avoid the construction of a separate category for popular religion—an issue I will return to.
The study of some topics should, perhaps, be given up altogether, at least until new sources or new methodologies become available. Our texts provide, for example, very little information about routine practices, such as daily prayers, weddings, or the celebrations of the two Islamic holidays. The modes of communal organization and the composition of religious congregations remain little known, even after close scrutiny of our sources. I have come to this conclusion after an obstinate struggle with my sources, in an attempt to identify the social unit within which the ‘average’ individual worshipped his Lord, found spiritual satisfaction, and underwent the rites of the common liturgical calendar and those of his personal life cycle. My search was inspired by a challenge addressed by the distinguished art-historian Oleg Grabar to historians who work with texts. Having noted that the twelfth century marks the beginning of a significant change in the urban landscape of the Middle East and Iran—namely, the appearance of a large number of small mosques and oratories, mausoleums for holy men and women, madrasas, ribats and monasteries of various types—Grabar suggests that those varying architectural forms had evolved to serve varying forms of emergent Muslim piety, and respond to the need of smaller social units.’ He adds: “While to my knowledge there never occurred a parish-like organization in Islam, archeological evidence suggests that the alliance of the individual Muslim [in the twelfth century] was parochial, though it is not clear whether the parochialism was related to quarters, or whether certain city-wide organizations took precedence over topographical proximity. To interpret the evidence we need further textual investigation.””° Intuitively, I maintain the impression that religious life must have been carried out in more or less cohesive congregations, that is—bodies of people, who maintained face to face relationships, acknowledged the same traditional rules and shared a sense of solidarity.” Those may have evolved in urban quarters, or in the framework of the madhhab, or perhaps around neighborhood and village mosques. Despite scholarly interest in the urban quarter and in the Islamic school of law, and the relatedness of these institutions to the wider issues of communal organization and the autonomy of the public sphere in Islamic societies, questions pertaining to the social cohesion of both institutions remain as yet unsolved.” Mosques seem to me as the institutions most likely to produce definable local congregations, but even though mosques are a major focus of research in this book, the evidence, as treated by my ‘tool kit’ at least, is insufficient to prove this assertion. Needless to say, it also cannot disprove the stance of Michael Chamberlain and D.S. Goitein regarding the question of communal organization in medieval Muslim society.
Chamberlain seriously doubts whether any organization existed at all. He describes Damascene society of the later Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods as almost devoid of group solidarities beyond those determined by familial ties and marriage alliances. He presents a realm of constant fitna and competition among the great a‘ydan households (namely, the families of warrior and civilian dignitaries), concluding that there were few, if any, corporate groups.” Goitein, whose study of Egyptian Jewry in the tenth to fourteenth centuries has transformed our understanding of its organization, also fails to find group solidarities within what he labels as “the amorphous masses of Muslims.” This, in contrast to the network of local closely knit semiautonomous Jewish communities (kahal or jamd‘a in the languages of the Genizah) that were organized around synagogues, and gave the individual member the opportunity to be active in the life of the congregation and shoulder its collective obligations.*°
As for culture, several models had been suggested, mainly by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, who attempted to study co-existent spheres of cultural production and consumption while avoiding the “two-tiered” model.’! Boaz Shoshan, the author of Popular culture in Medieval Cairo (Cambridge 1993),® the first book-length study on the cultural landscape of ordinary medieval Muslims, probed them all, concluding that the ‘two-tiered model of cultural discourse’, in the context of Islamic studies, cannot already be declared ‘passé’. Furthermore, he finds it usefully “challenging the conventional and simplistic assumption that long before our contemporary ‘mass culture’ there has been just one monolithic (Islamic, in this case) culture to which rulers and peasants, scholars and illiterate folk alike belonged.” Shoshan wishes to acknowledge that scholars had their own discourse, and that “the simple zuwwar [pilgrims]” were excluded from it, yet without ruling out “a multi-directional flow of culture.”*
While I do not wish to argue against the notion that the Muslim religious elite (the ‘u/amda’) had a discourse of their own, as implied by Shoshan’s and Burke’s approaches, nor for the notion that one monolithic culture embraced all—I would like to argue about the degree of the exclusion of commoners from the discourse of scholars on the one hand, and about the extent of their elimination from the practices of commoners on the other hand. The models suggested by Peter Burke (in 1978)** and Roger Chartier (1984) seem to me particularly interesting and applicative. Burke employs the terms coined by the anthropologist Robert Redfield, “great tradition, little tradition” to offer a model of an a-symmetrical relationship: while the great tradition is accessible only to the elite, the little tradition, oral and informal in nature, is accessible to all, and common to the different social groups. Hence the elite is, as it were, bilingual, possessing one additional language of its own.
Roger Chartier shifts the debate to the various strategies of appropriation and use of ‘cultural products’: texts and modes of behavior. He writes: “‘Popular’ religion is at the same time acculturated and acculturating, therefore...we must replace the study of cultural sets that were considered socially pure, with another point of view that recognizes such cultural forms as mixtures...it implies identifying and distinguishing not cultural sets defined as ‘popular’, but rather the specific ways in which such cultural sets are appropriated... What is ‘popular’ is neither culture created for the people, nor culture uprooted; it is a kind of relation with cultural objects.”** Chartier’s model seems most promising for the analysis of phenomena such as Qur’an recitation, ziydra, and commitment to the sharvi‘a. It calls for an effort to reveal the specific meaning that Muslims of different social categories attached to those practices, almost universally recognized as essential expressions of piety, neither ‘high’ nor ‘popular’. This, exactly, is the intent of this work.
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