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234 Pages
Ibadi Muslims of North Africa
The Ibadi Muslims, a little-known minority community, have lived in North Africa for over a thousand years. Combining an analysis of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools used in network analysis, Paul M. Love Jr. takes readers on a journey across the Maghrib and beyond as he traces the paths of a group of manuscripts and the Ibadi scholars who used them. Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period (eleventh—-sixteenth centuries) wrote a series of collective biographies (prosopographies), which together constructed a cumulative tradition that connected Ibadi Muslims from across time and space, bringing them together into a “written network.” From the Mzab valley in Algeria to the island of Jerba in Tunisia, from the Jebel Nafusa in Libya to the bustling metropolis of early modern Cairo, this book shows how people and books worked in tandem to construct and maintain an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib.
Paul M. Love Jr. is Assistant Professor of North African, Middle Eastern, and Islamic history at Al Akhawayn University, Morocco. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, is a former Fulbright scholar, and received three prestigious Critical Language Scholarships from the United States Department of State. His research has been funded by the Council for American Overseas Research Centers, the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Acknowledgments
This book has its origins in my doctoral thesis from the University of Michigan, and I am delighted to be able to offer my thanks and gratitude to those who helped me on the journey from dissertation to bbok— although I am terrified of forgetting someone.
During my time in Ann Arbor, I benefited from training in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. I thank my advisor, Michael Bonner, and my internal committee members, Alexander Knysh and Raymond Van Dam, for their support throughout the process of writing the thesis as well as for their guidance on how to turn it into a book in the future. Michael Brett from the School of Oriental and African Studies graciously agreed to serve as an outside committee member, and my project benefited in important ways from his advice, questions, and criticism. My colleagues in NES all shaped my project in ways I did not expect.
Conversations with my friends Noah Gardiner and Maxim Romanov led me to a dual interest in manuscripts and digital humanities, respectively. Evyn Kropf, Near Eastern Studies Librarian at the University of Michigan, has for years been a teacher and guide on the journey to learn more about manuscripts and the study of paper. I benefited tremendously from her knowledge and patience. Emma Park and Andrés Pletch deserve special thanks for being excellent friends, good cooks, and helpful critics. My colleagues and students at my new institutional home, Al Akhawayn University, have been a pleasure to work with and I have enjoyed working in such a supportive environment. Special thanks to Eric Ross for creating the map for the book.
Other friends and colleagues both inside and outside the academy helped me on the road from finishing the thesis to writing the book, including Cyrille Aillet, Susan Abraham, Sami Bargaoui, Kelsea Ballantyne, Mohamed Bennani, Jonathan Bloom, Zach Bloomfield, Ali Boujdidi, Frank Castiglione, Laryssa Chomiak, Martin Custers, Yacine Daddi Addoun, Moez Dridi, Derek Elliott, Adam Gaiser, Elisabeth Gilles, Ersilia Francesca, Amal Ghazal, Mehdi Houachine, Grazyna JurendtParuk, Nancy Linthicum, Valerie Hoffman, Renata Holod, Mohamed Hasan, Ali Hussain, Ryan Hunton, Yanay Israeli, Augustin Jomier, Gina Konstantopoulos, Cheng-Wei Lin, Massaoud Mezhoudi, Roberto Merlin, Soufien Mestaoui, James Miller, Antonella Muratgia, Ouahmi Ould-Braham, Karim Ouaras, Fatima Oussedik, Robert Parks, Virginie Prevost, Amanda Propst, Roman Pysyk, Valeriy Rybalkin, Karim Samji, Rachida Smine, Werner Schwartz, Zouheir Tighlet, Slimane Tounsi, Irina Yaremchuk, and Katja Zvan-Elliott.
Most of my research could never have happened without the support of my colleagues and friends from the Maghribi Ibadi community, many of whom opened the doors of their libraries to me. In Jerba, many thanks to Said El Barouni, Farhat Djaabiri, Ahmad Muslah, Naji Bin Ya‘qub, and Samir the taxi driver who put me in touch with the Bin Ya‘qub family. In Algiers and the Mzab, special thanks to ‘Umar Busa‘ada, Mohamed Hadj Said, Ahmed Abanou, Mustapha Bendrissou, Elias Bouras, Daoud from the Maktabat Irwan in Ateuf, Noah El-Bechir, and Muhammad and Salih Siusiu for their help at the Maktabat al-Qutb and great conversations about manuscripts. In Oman, many special thanks to Abdulrahman Salimi. I owe additional thanks to all those from the Ibadi organizations and libraries who helped me with research, including Jam ‘iyyat al-Turath, Jam ‘iyyat al-Shaykh Abi Ishaq Ibrahim Atfayyish; Maktabat ‘Ammi Sa‘id, Maktabat al-Qutb, Maktabat al-Hajj Salih La‘ali, Maktabat al-Istiqama, Maktabat At Khalid, Maktabat Al Yadr, Maktabat Al Fadl, Maktabat Irwan, Maktabat al-Hajj Mas‘ud Babakr, Association Djerba Ettwasol, Ibadica, and Jam‘iyyat al-Manar.
Funding for the research on which the book is based came from the University of Michigan’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, the UM African Studies Center, the UM Rackham Graduate School, the UM International Institute, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Islamic Manuscripts Association. I also had the opportunity to present many of these ideas in public forums, where I received valuable feedback. Special thanks to the participants of the “Roots and Routes 2014, Translation, Mediation, and Circulation: Digital Scholarship and the Pre-Modern Mediterranean” workshop at the University of Toronto, Scarborough (Toronto, 2014), “The International Conference on Ibadi Studies” at Cambridge University (Cambridge, 2014); “Workshop on Ibadi History and Bibliography” at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign, 2014); presentations at the Centre d’études maghrébines a Tunis and the Centre d'études maghrébines en Algérie (Tunis and Oran, 2015); “Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies” workshops at the Aga Khan University (London, 2015 and 2017); the “Islamic Studies Program Symposium on ‘Vernacular Islam’” at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, 2016); and the participants and attendees of the panel on “Ibadi Archives” at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (Boston, 2016). Additional thanks go to Maria Marsh and Abigail Walkington from Cambridge University Press and the two anonymous readers, whose helpful comments and criticisms helped me to improve the original manuscript.
Despite all this help, any mistakes or shortcomings remain my own. Finally, I owe the greatest thanks to my family, especially my parents Paul and Stephanie, whom I miss so much. My sister Lauren and nephew Xavier are always a source of fun and support, even from so far away. My in-laws in Tunis and Jerba make sure I always feel at home in both places and regularly offer their help and support in research. My wife Sarra astounds me every day with her intelligence, kindness, and patience. Her support for me in all things keeps me going and pushes me to try to be better at everything. Our daughter Sophia, who joined us while I was writing this book, has brought me more happiness than I can describe.
Thanks, everyone! Ifrane, 2018
Note on Transliteration and Dates
Transliterations from Arabic throughout the book follow a modified version of the system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). Throughout the main body of the text, I have not included the diacritical marks while still retaining the ‘ and ’ symbols to represent the Arabic letters ‘ayn and hamza, respectively. For the notes and the bibliography, I have included all diacritical marks. For secondary sources and published editions that follow systems of transliterating Arabic in languages other than English (Italian, French, German), I have modified the titles to conform to the IJMES system. I have followed the conventional English spellings for well-known Northern African toponyms, such as Jebel Nafusa, Jerba, Sedrata, and Mzab.
The transliteration of Berber (Amazigh) names and toponyms follows the Arabic system, since all the primary sources discussed here are originally in Arabic script. Although there are several variations in how Berber names are transliterated in late medieval Arabic, I have tried to be consistent. Unless otherwise noted, all dates in the main body of the text are provided in Common Era (CE) equivalents of their Islamic hijri (AH) originals.
Prologue: Tunis, 2014
On 31 October 2014 I walked into the entry hall of the Madinat al-‘Ulum (“City of Sciences”) complex in the northern suburb of Ariana just outside downtown Tunis. A large crowd had gathered, drinking juice, eating sweets, and discussing the books and manuscript facsimiles on the display tables in the center of the room. This event marked the beginning of the first annual conference on the “Ibadi Books of Siyar” (Kutub siyar al-Ibadiyya). The siyar were works of literature compiled from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries in Northern Africa by Ibadi Muslims, a minority religious community whose adherents have lived in the region since the eighth century CE.
It was a large conference of perhaps two hundred people. In addition to regional participants from Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya, the event had attracted a large group of scholars from Oman, where most of the world’s Ibadi Muslims live today. These latter stood out in their stark white dishdasha robes, elegant headgear, and long beards. Their Maghribi counterparts mostly wore suits, although some also dressed in white robes (often with button-down dress shirts underneath), had short beards, and a few donned small white hats. Many of the Omani students and scholars who had come were women, identifiable in their all-black attire that contrasted in its uniformity with that of other female attendees from Northern Africa and elsewhere dressed in a variety of styles. While the language of the conference was Modern Standard Arabic, the discussions took place in a variety of regional dialects of Arabic, as well as Tumzabt and French.
These two regional Ibadi communities had come together to discuss what they regard as some of the most important sources for understanding their shared past: the books of siyar. The meeting was especially symbolic for the Ibadi community because it was held openly in Tunis, which as more than one presenter noted would have been scarcely conceivable prior to the Tunisian revolution in January 2011. In the past, Ibadi communities in Tunisia had kept a relatively low profile, preferring not to attract the attention of the government. Nearly four years later, this conference was advertised throughout the city and on the internet. The Omanis had even brought a full production crew to film the conference. The event marked an open effort by the Tunisian Ibadi community to link their past and that of their coreligionists to the present. This was a public claim by both Northern African and Omani Ibadis that they belonged to the same religious community.
Panels discussed the genre, specific books and themes, as well as differences between the “eastern” (i.e. Omani) Ibadi meaning of siyar and its “western” (i.e. Maghribi) equivalent. In the east, the term siyar has historically referred to compilations of letters and opinions exchanged among Ibadi scholars. By contrast, in the Maghrib the siyar were books containing anecdotal and biographical information about individuals. Ibadis in late medieval Northern Africa never developed a genre of chronicle-style history (ta ’rikh) as did their contemporaries in western Asia. Instead, the siyar played that role, telling the story of the community’s past by bringing together anecdotes and biographies of its members from across time and space. In this way, the Ibadi siyar functioned as prosopographies, collective biographies in which stories about individual members come together to form a biography of the community. Through the inclusion or exclusion of individuals, these prosopographies drew the boundaries of the community and constructed an Ibadi tradition in Northern Africa.
Having come to Tunisia to search for manuscript copies of the Ibadi prosopographies and trace their history, I was struck by the immediate relevance and central importance of this corpus of late medieval books to this contemporary Ibadi audience. Through the conference, the participants were claiming a shared history not only between Northern Africa and Oman but also between Ibadis of the past and those of the present. For its participants, this conference was a continuation of the centuries-long maintenance of the prosopographical tradition in the region.
The event brought together widely dispersed members of the community to generate scholarly discussion and, crucially, to establish connections among them—to create a network of otherwise discontiguous actors. Despite differences in dress and language, through their participation and attendance the individuals at the conference asserted their ties with the broader Ibadi community. In drawing a straight line between past and present, these participants were also claiming membership in a much older network that had been constructed by the prosopographies themselves.
But this seamless move from past to present, this vision of a shared history that links the medieval Ibadi communities in both Northern Africa and Oman with those of today, belies a long history of tradition building characterized by as much discontinuity as continuity. The Ibadi communities of today are not identical to those of the eighth century any more than were those of the sixteenth. Building this tradition and creating the illusion of a seamless connection through time required centuries of inclusion and exclusion of individuals and groups, the restructuring and reconceptualization of power and leadership, the compilation and transmission of texts, and the constant movement of peoples and books.
How had these the Ibadi siyar constructed and maintained the late medieval Ibadi tradition in Northern Africa? Why did their importance extend beyond the sixteenth century, when the tradition ended? What was the conference eliding, overlooking, or silencing by presenting the history of community in this way? How did these medieval books, which for the conference participants lay at the center of their shared history, come to occupy such a place of prominence in the twenty-first century? After attending the conference, these were the issues I decided to address and the questions for which I sought answers. The journey led me to follow circuits of people and paper across the Sahara and the Mediterranean. The result is this book, which accompanies the Ibadi books of siyar on their travels and traces their role in the construction and maintenance of the Ibadi tradition through the constantly changing landscapes of Northern Africa over nearly a millennium.
Introduction: Mobilizing with Manuscripts
When the eleventh-century Ibadi Muslim scholar Abu al-Rabi‘ Sulayman b. Yakhlaf al-Mazati was asked by his student whether he should consult a book of legal opinions attributed to older generations of scholars, he responded: “Of course! How have we associated with so many of those pious scholars who came before us if not through books?”!
Both the question and its answer reveal the growing power of manuscript books in Northern Africa by the beginning of the Middle Period (eleventh-sixteenth centuries) to bring together scholars of different times and places, incorporating them into the same community. For a religious minority like Ibadi Muslims in the late medieval Maghrib, books complemented the webs of personal relationships connecting students and teachers. Ibadis, a Muslim minority community following neither the Sunni nor the Shi‘i traditions of Islam, lived throughout the earlier medieval centuries (the eighth-tenth centuries) in towns and villages across the southern Maghrib stretching from Sijilmasa in what is today southern Morocco to the mountains of the Jebel Nafusa in what is today northwestern Libya. In the early medieval period their communities had flourished, especially through their participation in Saharan trade. But by the eleventh century Ibadis had begun their steady numerical decline in the region. Their numbers dwindled as Arabic-speaking Sunni communities spread into regions where Berber-speaking Ibadis had previously made up the majority. Ibadi scholars responded to this existential threat through literal and literary mobilization.
Itinerant students and scholars traveled widely and met together in small study circles, drawing personal and intellectual connections among different centers of learning in Northern Africa. A longstanding tradition of Saharan trade facilitated travel, and its routes provided the links among different Ibadi towns and villages. Out of these interactions among students and scholars, a formalized system of education and an accompanying large body of texts emerged over the next few centuries. One specific genre, collective biographical texts or “prosopographies” (Ar. siyar), both recorded this process and represented the second method of mobilization among Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period. Each prosopographical text comprised anecdotes and biographies of exemplary Ibadis from the collectively imagined beginnings of the community in the early centuries of Islam nearly up to its compiler’s lifetime. The prosopographies determined which stories survived as well as which scholars belonged to the Ibadi community and its history. Unconstrained by the lifetime or memory of an individual, these books drew connections among scholars of multiple generations and constructed the Ibadi tradition in the Maghrib by marking its boundaries.
As Abu al-Rabi‘ al-Mazati suggested in the response to his student’s question, the perceived value of books extended beyond their capacity to create a narrative of the community’s history. The prosopographies also connected the scholars of the present to those of the past. In doing so, these books at once cloaked them in the mantle of the authority of their predecessors and drew the boundaries of the Ibadi community through the inclusion or exclusion of certain individuals or groups. The prosopographical tradition expanded and adapted to the circumstances of the community, with each iteration reflecting the historical experience of the Ibadi community in the Maghrib during the period of its compilation. Each century from the eleventh to the sixteenth witnessed the compilation of a new work of Ibadi prosopography, and each new work of siyar absorbed many of the stories of its predecessors—adopting and adapting them to suit the compiler’s purposes. Through books, as Abu al-Rabi‘ said, each new generation of Ibadi scholars associated with those that came before it.
A WRITTEN NETWORK
This book tells the story of the compilation, adaptation, and circulation of this late medieval Ibadi prosopographical corpus. I argue that the history of this corpus exemplifies the long-term process of the construction and maintenance of an Ibadi tradition in Northern Africa. The books themselves serve as the main actors in this story, although the scholars whose lives they chronicled and who created and used them play important supporting roles.
Constructing and maintaining the Ibadi tradition in the Maghrib and its boundaries occurred on two distinct but closely interrelated levels. On the narrative level, the Ibadi prosopographies connected several generations of individuals across time and space. When they appeared as friends, colleagues, or fellow travelers in stories, Ibadi scholars became linked to one another. Likewise, even in those cases where hundreds of years separated two or more individuals, their inclusion in the same prosopographical text brought them into a single historical and religious community. I have called this narrative web of connections and associations among Ibadi scholars, constructed and maintained by the prosopographies, a “written network.”
The second component relates to the manuscripts themselves and the constellation of links among people, places, and books. I argue here for the importance of examining the physical, material history of these and other Ibadi manuscripts in Northern Africa. Ideas and memory did not move throughout the Sahara and the Mediterranean littoral solely inside the heads of people. As object-actors, manuscript copies of the Ibadi prosopographies proved as important as individuals in the transmission of the tradition in the long run. Manuscripts allowed for the continuation of the tradition through the Middle Period and well beyond. Moreover, the late medieval and early modern transmission of the siyar in manuscript form explains the survival of these texts up to the present day.
Manuscript books and people traversed the same paths, moving in tandem along the circuits that connected the geographic hubs of Ibadi intellectual and commercial activity in Northern Africa. While the Ibadi written network appears in the synchronic iterations of the siyar, behind it lie dense circuits of the continuous movement of people and books. As a complement to the written network, I follow the manuscript copies of the Ibadi siyar as they move along often elliptical trajectories. Since both Ibadi scholars and their books often returned to their point of departure, whether in their original form or as a new copy or other textual vestige, I refer to these journeys and their trajectories as “orbital” (discussed further below). The orbits of the Ibadi prosopographies provide the dynamic complement to the written network they helped create and maintain.
MADHHABIZATION: HISTORICAL CONTEXT(S) FOR THE PROSOPOGRAPHICAL CORPUS
The written network of the Ibadi prosopographies and its orbit emerged out of two interrelated contexts. First were the historical circumstances specific to the Ibadi community in the Maghrib, while the second was the broader historical context of the Middle Period in which Ibadis lived.
As for the first, the styar were not of course the only books Ibadis were writing or circulating from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, nor were they the first. Texts produced by identifiably Ibadi Muslim authors represent some of the earliest works of literature by autochthonous Northern Africans. For example, the Kitab bad’ al-islam wa-shara i‘ al-din by Ibn Sallam al-Ibadi (ninth century) may well be the earliest work of historiography by a Muslim author from the Maghrib. Ibadi epistles on theology, and especially responsa literature between the Ibadi Imams of the Maghrib and their communities, also long predate the prosopographical tradition. Many texts from the ninth and tenth centuries survive in much later manuscript copies, and the Ibadi prosopographical tradition without doubt built off older textual traditions in the Maghrib. But by the eleventh century, circumstances had changed for the Ibadi communities in the region (see Chapters 1 and 2). In numerical decline and pushed to the edges of the Maghrib, this new context contributed to the formation of a genre of literature, distinct in form and purpose from that which preceded it.
The Ibadi prosopographical corpus developed alongside larger efforts toward community construction from the eleventh century forward. John Wilkinson has called this process Ibadi “madhhabization,” from the Arabic term madhhab, used to refer to different schools of thought and law in Islam. He and other historians of both eastern and western Ibadi communities have pointed to similar moves toward the formalization of Ibadi theology, hadith, law, and political theory in this same period.”
Perhaps the clearest instance of this process took place in the realm of hadith. While the “science of hadith” tradition had formed by the ninth century or so in the east, before the twelfth century Ibadi scholars did not follow in that tradition.’ The preoccupation of Sunni scholars with the chains of transmission (sing. isvad) of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad that helped lead to some of the most impressive prosopographical literature of the Middle Period in western and central Asia was almost entirely absent from Ibadi circles. Ibadi hadith compendia did exist long before the twelfth century, including most famously al-Jami‘ al-sahih, attributed to the Ibadi Imam in Basra al-Rabi‘ b. Habib al-Farahidi (d. 791).* But Ibadi scholars approached these compendia with the assumption that their very transmission in the community assured their authenticity, and so chains of transmission only appear on occasion. As Adam Gaiser has noted, this suggests that Ibadi scholars followed a much older approach to hadith, but also that their tradition “increasingly diverged from Sunni and later Shi‘i norms.” This situation persisted all the way until the twelfth century, when Northern African Ibadi scholar Abu Ya‘qub Yusuf b. Ibrahim al-Warjalani (d. 1174/5) composed his Tartib al-musnad, which brought the Ibadi tradition of hadith in line with Sunni standards, including attention to chains of transmission.°
Like hadith, the Ibadi prosopographical tradition belonged to this much broader process of madhhabization. Compared to the number of other texts from different genres compiled in the Middle Period, the prosopographies represent only a small part of the larger written corpus. Out of all proportion to its size, however, this corpus has maintained its importance because these works chronicled the lives and relationships among Ibadi scholars, marking the boundaries of the community itself. As such, I argue that the siyar represent the most explicit, sustained effort at the larger process of the construction of the Ibadi tradition in Northern Africa.
The second context out of which the written network emerged was the larger world in which Ibadis lived during the Middle Period. Highlighting this context helps demonstrate some of the ways in which this book connects to other studies in Islamic history, in terms of both historical context and methodology. In terms of historical context, the Ibadi siyar were not the only works of prosopography produced by Muslims in Middle Period, but their use of the term siyar itself, as Chase Robinson has pointed out, distinguishes Ibadis early on from other Muslim communities.’ The term became associated primarily with either the archetypal biography of the Prophet Muhammad (al-sira al-nabawiyya) or biographies of individuals.* Ibadis, by contrast, employed the term in slightly different ways. In the east, Ibadis continued for centuries to use the term sira for religious epistles, while those in Northern Africa used the term for prosopographies.’
For other Islamic traditions, however, different genres served similar functions to the Maghribi Ibadi siyar, including so-called biographical dictionaries (works of tabagat and mu jam), which appeared quite early in the ninth century. While universal, chronologically driven histories (ta ’rikh), a tradition exemplified by al-Tabari’s (d. tenth century) Ta rikh al-rusul wa-’l-muluk, were absent from the Ibadi tradition in the Maghrib, the siyar played a similar role in preserving the community’s past.'°
The Ibadis were thus not unique in developing literature that fulfilled the function of community building in the Middle Period. Not only were they drawing inspiration from existing Sunni traditions of tabagat and ta ’rikh, they were writing at precisely the same time as their Sunni contemporaries were witnessing major transformations in the historiographical tradition, including “an explosion of contemporary history.”!! These centuries saw the composition of some of the most exhaustive and remarkable local or community-based prosopographies and histories in the larger Islamic tradition. Chase Robinson has argued that it was a move away from traditionist-minded (i.e. hadith transmitter) approaches to historiography that led to this major shift.'* Fascinatingly, Ibadi scholars were moving in the opposite direction in this same period. As noted above, the process of madhhabization meant that Ibadi scholars of hadith adopted Sunni norms at the same moment that Sunni “secretaries and bureaucrats” broke with older approaches to history writing.’ In either case, however, a growing sense of locality and community helped push the development of historiography, including prosopography, forward. Although equally propelled by their increasing marginalization and numerical decline, Ibadis also belonged to this much larger transformation to Islamic historiography in the Middle Period.
Beyond connecting Ibadis to other Muslim communities and their traditions of historiography, alongside my argument about the formation of the Ibadi tradition in Northern Africa sits a methodological intervention that I believe could be of use to historians of other traditions. In the story of the Ibadis I see potential parallels regarding the construction and maintenance of different Muslim communities and their written traditions. Previous studies have examined similar genres of literature like those discussed above and how they functioned in much the same way to help build a sense of community.'* Yet too little attention has been given to the ways in which various communities in the history of Islam have often relied on the interplay between the movement of people and texts for both their crystallization and long-term vitality. The two complementary and interdependent networks—one written, one human—work together to draw the limits of religious community. Moreover, these networks bore the responsibility of making that community into a tradition, in its literal sense of “passing” or “delivering” it from one generation to the next. This is precisely what I mean in emphasizing both the construction and the maintenance of the tradition over time. As such, the argument I make here about Ibadis seems to me equally applicable to the medieval textual corpora of jurists or traditionists in Baghdad or Damascus, Sufi communities in South Asia, or poets in al-Andalus. The relationships among community, texts, and identity in different subsets of Islamic societies also conforms to the idea of “textual communities” developed by Brian Stock for late medieval Christianity in Europe. Moreover, it deserves note that it was in precisely this same period (eleventh-twelfth centuries) that Stock described this transformation.' The key underlying idea is that the Middle Period witnessed a change in which the very creation of texts ended up altering the way the community was understood.
Indeed, in presenting this idea of the construction of the Ibadi prosopographical tradition to other historians of Muslim communities I have at times been told that the argument is almost intuitive, if not obvious. Of course, these kinds of texts do the work of drawing the boundaries of the community. I find this response encouraging. The growing consensus seems to be that prosopographies and biographical texts do the work of tradition building and community construction. But neither the texts nor the people who use them, I argue, could have built or maintained a tradition without the other. Perhaps most importantly, demonstrating how texts worked alongside the people who used them proves not nearly as easy as taking this relationship for granted. I offer here an example of how books and people draw the boundaries of community and I hope that this model proves useful for thinking about similar processes in the history of other Muslim communities.
THE PROMINENCE OF THE SIYAR CORPUS
My discussion of this process of tradition building centers on five prominent Ibadi prosopographies in Northern Africa, with each representing about one century of the history of the community in the region (see Chapter Outlines below). Beyond their chronological arrangement, I have chosen these specific books for several reasons. The first stems from their prominence in the Maghribi Ibadi tradition itself. Long before the contemporary importance of the siyar described in the prologue, these five books occupied a distinguished place in the pre-modern Ibadi tradition, evidenced especially by their circulation in manuscript form (discussed in Chapter 8). Other pre-modern siyar existed, but the circulation of manuscript copies of similar works, such as Muqrin b. Muhammad al-Baghturi’s (d. early thirteenth century) book known as the Siyar alBaghturi or Siyar maskhayikh Nafusa, paled in comparison to the five works I examine here. Moreover, modern works of siyar such as Sa‘id b. ‘Ali b. Ta‘arit’s (d. 1936) Risala fi ta’rikh Jarba or Abu al-Yaqzan Ibrahim’s (d. 1973) Mulhagq al-siyar explicitly situate themselves as continuations of these prosopographical works of the Middle Period. '*
A second reason for choosing these five books comes from their prominence in modern historiography on the Ibadis. Some of these works were among the first to be printed in lithograph form by Ibadi print houses in late nineteenth-century Cairo.!’ This made them far more accessible to European scholars than their manuscript equivalents, housed in private libraries throughout Northern Africa. When manuscript copies of the Ibadi siyar did become available to European orientalists, it was in the context of colonialism. French and to a lesser extent Italian colonial-era officials, travelers, and historians privileged the siyar from an early date, due in part to the utility of knowledge about the Ibadi past for serving colonial interests in the Mzab valley, the island of Jerba, and the Jebel Nafusa.'® Perhaps the most prominent author on Maghribi Ibadi communities in the twentieth century, the Polish historian Tadeusz Lewicki (d. 1992) published dozens of articles based on manuscript and lithograph copies of the prosopographies at his home institution (first in Lviv and later in Krak6w). These books had been acquired through a combination of travel in northern Africa by his teacher, Zygmunt Smogorzewski (d. 1931), and the purchase of manuscripts from the personal library of the French colonial interpreter Adolphe Motylinski (d. 1907).'° Another wellknown scholar who worked on the siyar, the Italian orientalist Roberto Rubinacci, based his research on Ibadi lithographs and manuscripts acquired following the Italian invasion of Tripolitania in 1912-13.”°
In the wake of Maghribi independence from colonial control in the 1950s and 1960s, Ibadi historians engaged with colonial-era work on their community’s history. In some cases this involved rectifying what Ibadi scholars viewed as the errors of colonial historiography. Continuing interest in and attention to the five prosopographies examined here later led to several new print editions of each of them, edited and published in both Northern Africa and Oman in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This combined pre-modern, colonial-era, and post-independence interest and research on the five works of prosopography discussed here has contributed to their unparalleled importance in modern historiography on the Ibadis.*!
PROSOPOGRAPHICAL NETWORKS: A NEW METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH
Although these five books have long served historians as the main sources for Ibadi history in the Maghrib, in this book I approach them from a very different perspective. The traditional method of using these texts has assumed that they represent interrelated yet separate and distinct collections of biographies and anecdotes about the Ibadi community. By contrast, I follow the initial suggestion of Elizabeth Savage in treating these works as a corpus of prosopographies resulting from a centuries-long “cumulative process of tradition building” by Ibadis in Northern Africa. That is, these works must be approached as a cumulative and interconnected textual tradition rather than as separate and disparate sources for telling the history of the community.”
In approaching these five books and their history as a corpus, I adopt some methodological tools from the field of network analysis. “A network,” writes Mark Newman, “is, in its simplest form, a collection of points joined together in pairs by lines. In the jargon of the field the points are referred to as vertices or nodes and the lines are referred to as edges.” The study of networks assumes a priori that the relationships among nodes constitute an item worthy of inquiry and analysis. This focus on the structure of the relationships means that network analysts have an interest in identifying patterns underlying the formation, growth, and sometimes the destruction of these relationships. I use network analysis in this book as a tool for understanding the relationships among people and manuscripts because these relationships can reveal something important about the structure and maintenance of the Ibadi tradition in Northern Africa. In a way, my point is just that: the relationships are the tradition.
The very idea of a prosopography lends itself to network analysis. As in a network, a prosopography provides structure and meaning to a web of relationships among individuals. As Chase Robinson has succinctly put it: “prosopographies make individuals members.”** Understanding the relationships among nodes (i.e. individual scholars) and the “links” or “edges” (i.e. relationships) among them draws a picture of the structure of the Ibadi prosopographical texts and the community they created. Furthermore, the language of “edges” emphasizes the role of these texts in marking the boundaries of the Ibadi community through the inclusion and exclusion of individuals.
IDENTIFYING RELATIONSHIPS IN THE SIYAR
Applying the tools of network analysis to these texts required a model for identifying relationships among individuals. A unique structure underlies each text, although they share the feature of telling the biography of the community through stories, anecdotes, or narratives about individuals.
Actors interact in many ways in these texts, and their relationships do not remain static. Relationship types included: teacher-student, student— student, father-son, siblings, cousins, travel partners, and fellow scholars. But students who finish their studies and take on their own students no longer have the same relationship with their former teachers.
No model (at least none that I could devise) could take account of the full spectrum of relationships among Ibadi scholars and how they changed over time. Instead, I elected to focus on the most salient feature of these relationships in the texts: instances of in-person interaction. Whenever two individuals encountered one another in an anecdote or a biographical sketch, I noted that relationship in a spreadsheet. The two columns represented the two individuals mentioned in the story. Likewise, in encounters among more than two individuals, those relationships were divided into binaries so that they would fit the model (Figure 0.1).
When an individual appeared in an anecdote alone, without any obvious connection to someone else, I placed their name in both columns (called a “self-loop”) to ensure that their presence in the text was recorded.
Having compiled these interactions in a spreadsheet, I then imported them into a network mapping software called Gephi.** The software produces network graphs based on the relationships in the spreadsheet. Any two individuals whose names appear side by side in the spreadsheet appear on the graph with a link between them. The larger the number of links an individual has (called the “degree”), the larger their name appears in the graph. For example, the spreadsheet for a network consisting of one teacher and her five students, none of whom know each other, would look like Figure 0.2.
Gephi would then take those data and visualize them in as in Figure 0.3.
In this example, the teacher appears much larger because she possesses five links, while each of the students appears equal in size because they have only one. Turning to an example from the Ibadi prosopographies, the network graph of the first part of the first work in the corpus, the Kitab al-sira, appears in Figure 0.4.
In this book I use these network graphs not as exact numerical measurements of relationships among individuals, but rather as heuristic devices for investigating the structure and aims of each text, as well as how it compares to those that preceded it. Many individual scholars appear multiple (sometimes dozens) of times in the same prosopography. For example, Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad b. Bakr (no. 1 in Figure 0.4) stands out in the example above as a central node in the network.
Visualizing these relationships revealed the structure of the texts. The centrality or marginality of certain figures often surprised me, and led to new ways of thinking about the prosopographies. Sometimes, I knew in advance which scholars would have the highest degrees. Often, however, a name would appear much smaller or larger than I had expected, based on the individual’s prominence in the wider Ibadi written tradition. That required explanation.
In addition, once I had created these maps I could use other tools from Gephi to examine the structure of the network. For example, calculating the average degree (number of links among scholars) of the network indicated the relative importance of an individual. If the average degree was 3.5, an individual with 29 connections stood out as an especially central character in the network. Specific numbers matter far less in the grand scheme of things than the proportions. Another, related, tool of network analysis called “degree distribution” plots out the numbers of connections each scholar has in a histogram. For example, Figure 0.5 shows the degree distribution for the second prosopography in the corpus, the Siyar al-Wisyani.
This graph demonstrates that a very small number of individuals possess far more links than the average. Using network maps, I had to think through why or how certain individuals came to play such key roles in the texts. Reading this type of network graph is as much an interpretive art as a science, and it still requires a thorough understanding of the context and content of the text from which it is drawn.
Finally, the network graphs convey in visual form another key component of my argument. Namely, that the Ibadi prosopographies construct a community and tradition by linking generations of scholars across time and space. In using these network graphs, I am not suggesting that the late medieval compilers or readers of these works would have visualized these relationships among scholars in the same way as the graphs depict them. Nevertheless, the narrative framing of the prosopographies suggests that scholars did understand that connections mattered, and that among the most important types of connections were those with prominent individuals from the past. The edges (or links) among individual scholars in the network graphs represent the limits of community. Through their inclusion or exclusion of certain individuals or groups, the Ibadi prosopographies drew the boundaries of Ibadi Islam in Northern Africa. The network graphs serve to visualize this process of tradition building.
ORBITS: NETWORKS OF MANUSCRIPTS AND PEOPLE
Network analysis provided a useful toolbox for studying the relationships within the texts. When I tried to do something similar with the extant manuscript copies themselves, however, I encountered several setbacks. First of all, any attempt to trace genealogies of copying stood little chance. Most copies lacked paratextual evidence such as detailed colophons or ownership statements that might have permitted me to identify the provenance of a given manuscript. Moreover, I began to realize that this biological metaphor for textual traditions overlooks the much more interesting (and messy) history of texts as they are transformed, summarized, borrowed from, and abbreviated over several centuries. Secondly, although the extant corpus of manuscripts of the five prosopographies was not numerically small (112 extant copies), when I took the span of time and space separating them into account, I grew more disheartened. The clear majority of extant manuscript copies of the Ibadi prosopographies dated to after the end of the tradition in the fifteenth century, and most were from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. In short, the fanciful idea of drawing some kind of network map connecting the different copies quickly disintegrated.
Out of this frustrating realization, I developed an approach to the manuscript copies of the siyar that in the end proved complementary to their contents. One of the fundamental problems with network maps like those I analyze here is that they reduce relationships to static and unchanging lines between names. Behind those lines and names, of course, lies a complex web of dynamic interactions that constantly changed. The lives and peregrinations of the manuscript copies of the Ibadi prosopographies and the scholars who produced and used them served as witnesses to the constant movement of peoples, texts, and ideas that allowed for the maintenance of the written network described in the texts.
And as I began investigating the histories of these manuscripts and the people who used them, I noticed a few locations that kept reappearing. Fragmentary evidence drawn from colophons, ownerships statements, watermarks, and other manuscript data allowed me to identify the principal circuits along which they moved. Drawing inspiration from John Wansbrough’s study of diplomatic correspondence in Mediterranean, I refer to these elliptical circuits connecting different hubs from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries as orbits.** These orbits of people and books from the fifteenth century forward, comprising several sites of intellectual activity and manuscript production throughout Northern Africa, accounted for the maintenance of the written network well beyond the end of the prosopographical tradition of the Middle Period. As a result, the structure of the book mirrors its argument: that the Ibadi prosopographical corpus—both its contents and its extant physical remains in the form of manuscripts—bears responsibility for the construction and longterm maintenance of the Ibadi tradition in Northern Africa.
CHAPTER OUTLINES
Chapter 1 introduces the readers unfamiliar with Ibadi Muslims in the Maghrib to the traditional version of the history of Ibadi communities in the early medieval period. It begins by relating the story of the semilegendary arrival of the community in Northern Africa in the eighth century. This includes a discussion of how this story became useful to later writers of the ninth and tenth centuries. The primary purpose of the chapter is to set the historical stage for the development of the Ibadi prosopographical tradition in the Middle Period (eleventh-sixteenth centuries). In particular, I describe the historical moment of the mid-eleventh century in the Maghrib, and how the tradition emerged out of the political and religious landscape of the period.
Chapter 2 demonstrates how the first work of Ibadi prosopography called the Kitab al-sira constructed a written network that laid the foundation for an Ibadi tradition in Northern Africa in the eleventh century. The chapter begins by examining the interplay among the work’s structure, its intended aims, and the historical context out of which it emerged. It focuses on how the Kitab al-sira wove together literary themes to create a historical narrative of seamless transition from the Rustamid dynasty in the eighth century to Ibadi scholars of the eleventh. The chapter then turns its attention to the written network of Ibadi scholars. Employing tools from network analysis and using network maps, it reveals how the Kitab al-sira used stories about a handful of individual scholars to create a community.
Using a collection of written traditions compiled in the twelfth century known as the Siyar al-Wisyani, in Chapter 3 I argue that the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries witnessed two important steps toward the construction and maintenance of the Ibadi community. The first was a move toward privileging the book and writing as tools for the preservation of the Ibadi past, as well as for establishing and maintaining connections among scholars. The second was the sharpening of the boundaries of that community through an increasingly precise description of both the structure of the Ibadi community and the distinction between them and their non-Ibadi contemporaries. Chapter 4 uses the thirteenth-century Ibadi prosopography called the Kitab al-tabaqat by Abu al-‘Abbas al-Darjini to show that this period witnessed the formalization of the Ibadi prosopographical tradition in several ways. These included the written institutionalization of a council-rule system, the structural arrangement of Ibadi scholars from the past into generations of fifty years (tabagat), the linguistic triumph of Arabic in written scholarship, and a further move toward manuscripts as tools for the transmission of knowledge alongside their oral equivalents. These steps toward formalization likewise mirror the changes in the political and religious landscapes of the Ibadi archipelago out of which the book emerged. Finally, the chapter shows how the written network of Kitab al-tabaqat represents a contracted and refined version of its predecessors.
Chapter 5 briefly zooms out to pull together a reoccurring theme of the previous chapters: the spread of the use of and trade in paper throughout Northern Africa. Using examples drawn from the extant manuscripts of the prosopographies, I show that one of the main reasons for the commitment of the prosopographical tradition to paper was that Ibadis in the Middle Period were living at a time when paper was becoming much easier to obtain, even in the remotest areas of the Sahara. This situates Ibadis within a much larger context of written culture in the Mediterranean and Sahara. Likewise, their following this broader trend of committing texts to writing contributes to the formalization of their history in the prosopographical tradition.
In Chapter 6 I turn my attention to the fourth work of Ibadi prosopography, the fourteenth-century Kitab al-jawahir by Abu al-Qasim alBarradi. This book departs radically from its predecessors by extending the written network backward in time all the way to the very beginnings of Islam. Al-Barradi claims for Ibadism some of the earliest companions of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, and retells the history of Islam all the way up to the Rustamid dynasty. I show that this “retroactive” networking allows al-Barradi to present Ibadi history as the history of Islam itself.
In addition to comprising a history of Islam, the Kitab al-jawahir also includes a list of books known to its author in the fourteenth century. I conclude the chapter by showing what this book list—comprising eastern and western Ibadi works from several centuries—reveals (and conceals) about Ibadi manuscript collections in the fourteenth century. In addition, I demonstrate that the book list complements al-Barradi’s history in linking Ibadi books from both east and west, bringing them together to produce a canonical list of the community’s literature.
In Chapter 7 I show how the fifth and final work, the Kitab al-siyar, brought the medieval tradition of Ibadi prosopography to a close. I argue that this late fifteenth-century work by Abu al-‘Abbas al-Shammakhi marks the end of the tradition by compiling all of the biographies of its predecessors into one collection. I demonstrate that al-Shammakhi could do that because he lived in the fifteenth-century Maghrib, where manuscripts and libraries were far more abundant than ever before. In addition, since Ibadis had declined in number significantly, and now studied alongside their Sunni contemporaries, the Kitab al-siyar offers its biographies of the Ibadi community as much to non-Ibadis as to Ibadis. As such, I show that the end of the tradition of prosopography in the Middle Period also marked a recognition within the Ibadi community of their minority status as one of many religious traditions in the region.
The network maps of the Kitab al-siyar demonstrate how al-Shammakhi crafted his arrangement of the biographies. When read closely, these biographies appear to lack any specific order. Using network analysis to map the text, I reveal that al-Shammakhi divided the written network of relationships into temporal divisions, corresponding to the major divisions of Ibadi history in the Maghrib.
In Chapter 8 I shift the focus of the argument away from the content of the prosopographical texts and toward the physical manuscript copies of them. While creating a relational database of extant manuscripts of the prosopographies, I learned that most of the surviving copies date to well after the end of the tradition itself. As a result, I take the argument beyond the Middle Period. Based on manuscript evidence, I argue that the circulation of these manuscripts from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries accounts for the survival of the prosopographical corpus well beyond the end of the tradition itself.
But manuscripts did not move alone. The combined effort of people and books, moving in tandem along often elliptical circuits, allowed the prosopographical tradition to continue. I call these circuits of movement the “orbits” of the written network. Individuals or texts would often return to their point of origin, whether in their original form or as a relative, a student, or a textual vestige. The movement described within the texts (the written network) found its complement in the movement of the manuscripts and people along these orbital circuits.
Finally, in Chapter 9 I demonstrate what the extant copies of the Ibadi prosopographical corpus reveal about Ibadi manuscript culture of over the periods discussed in previous chapters. Examples relating to paratexts, watermarks, and bindings show the ways in which Ibadi manuscript culture, like the prosopographical tradition it helped produce, at once reflected circumstances particular to the Ibadi communities of Northern Africa and followed broader trends in the Arab-Islamic manuscript tradition in which they operated.
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