Download PDF | Megan H. Reid - Law and Piety in Medieval Islam-Cambridge University Press (2013).
266 Pages
Law and Piety in Medieval Islam
The Ayyubid and Mamluk periods were two of the most intellectually vibrant in Islamic history. Megan H. Reid’s book, which traverses three centuries from 1170 to 1500, recovers the stories of medieval men and women who were renowned not only for their intellectual prowess but also for their devotional piety. Through these stories, the book examines trends in voluntary religious practice that have been largely overlooked in modern scholarship.
This type of piety was distinguished by the pursuit of God’s favor through additional rituals, which emphasized the body as an instrument of worship, and through the rejection of worldly pleasures, and even society itself. Using an array of sources including manuals of law, fatwa collections, chronicles, and obituaries, the book shows what it meant to be a good Muslim in the medieval period and how Islamic law helped to define holy behavior. In its concentration on personal piety, ritual, and ethics the book offers an intimate perspective on medieval Islamic society.
Megan H. Reid is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California.
Acknowledgments
This book benefited first of all from Marigold Acland at Cambridge University Press, who expressed enthusiasm for my project and was a pleasure to work with. She encouraged me patiently through challenges, as did Helen Wheeler and Mary Starkey. Mary did far more than copyedit this text; engaging with someone of her caliber was immensely rewarding, and I know that not many authors have this privilege. Both readers for Cambridge drew my attention to issues large and small, particularly Marion Katz, who caught some “egregious errors” (to use Ibn al-Najjar’s expression) and was generous with her detailed, insightful comments.
I want to express my deep appreciation for the support I received from a number of institutions and foundations. At the University of Southern California I have benefited from Faculty Development Grants, and I want to thank especially Deans Dani Byrd and Kathleen Speer, who have shown great kindness and were instrumental in allowing me time to work on this project. A fellowship from the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute provided me a semester in which to reconceptualize parts of the book. I traveled to London with a grant from the Center for Feminist Research at USC that allowed me to undertake several weeks of follow-up archival research.
The book was built upon earlier research and writing conducted with the help of Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, the Ora J. Bretall Fellowship in Religion, and other generous support from Princeton University. A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship allowed me to spend a year in Egypt and France; and the Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship was crucial during the final year of writing.
I am happy to acknowledge never-to-be-repaid debts to several teachers and mentors. Michael Morony at UCLA encouraged my interest in writing about a model of piety rather than a social type. My dissertation advisor, Shaun Marmon, brought an entire world to life through her excitement about the field and the Arabic sources. I still miss the pleasure of her intellectual rigor and her good company. I am proud to have been her first graduate student.
Discussions with Peter Brown encouraged me to look for and appreciate the strange, the puzzling, and the humorous in the lives of people in the medieval period. His belief in my project was a great source of comfort. My years at Princeton were enlivened by a friendship with Oleg Grabar, with whom I had wandering and scandalous conversations about many things, including wanderers and scandalous piety. I thank Avram Udovitch, under whose tutelage my love of Islamic legal texts blossomed, and also Patricia Crone, who was a marvelous interlocutor. I thoroughly enjoyed the year I spent as her research assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study.
I feel lucky to have chosen a field filled with colleagues whose ideas I admire and whose companionship I have enjoyed so much: Ali Ballouti, Jonathan Berkey, Anne Broadbridge, Sandra Campbell, Dani Doueiri, Brian Edwards, Daphna Ephrat, Jason Glenn, Molly Green, John Iskander, Tariq al-Jamil, Nasser Rabbat, Jennifer Roth, and Brad Verter. Before I met any of these, the door was opened by Emile Durzi, to whom I will always be grateful.
Tamer el-Leithy and I worked on our dissertations together, and there is much of our delightful friendship in this book. Lisa Bitel has had the least fun role to play, but she cannot know how much her support, her intellectual engagement, and her irreverent sense of humor have meant to me. She and Peter Mancall have brought much joy to my life in Los Angeles.
The most important thanks of all must go to Paul Cobb, who every year has provided yet more steady friendship and super support as a comrade, colleague, trouper, reader, mover, shaker.
At the last stages, and thus last in these acknowledgments, my loving thanks and unending gratitude go to my mother, Penny Holbrook, to my sister, Cassandra Reid, and to my husband, Djamel Hamdad. I could not have finished this book without them.
Introduction
Devotional Piety and Islamic Law
Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, the famous fourteenth-century jurist known today as the watchdog of Islamic orthodoxy, had a brother named ‘Abd Allah, who appears in medieval biographical dictionaries as a jurisconsult (mufti), a devotee (‘abid), and an ascetic (zahid), among other things. Although ‘Abd Allah had an excellent education and even taught Islamic law for a time, he is said to have preferred solitude, and took to remaining in his house during the day so as to avoid people. By night he went to pray in abandoned mosques outside the city of Damascus.
Renowned for his devotional piety, he made the Pilgrimage to Mecca many times, performed at least one minor miracle, and when he died in 727/1327 he was buried among the tombs of the Sufis. Only one author mentions that he was blessed with unusual mystical insight, which suggests that his Sufi qualities were not, chiefly, what made him into a pious exemplar, into a man of such perfection that others sought, or were encouraged, to pattern their own lives on his.
Islam is often distinguished from other religions because of its emphasis on textual learning and a type of religious authority that is based on knowledge of texts. So why, in a society that revered its scholars so highly, was a misanthropic ex-jurisconsult held up as an exemplar? What seems to have fascinated his biographers was his departure from learned society, not his privileged position within it. One biography articulates this especially clearly: ‘Abd Allah’s escapes were frequent, and he would have liked to make them permanent “despite” his having mastered law (fiqh), Arabic grammar, history, both ancient and recent, and other fields. In fact, his rejection of society would have made sense quite easily to medieval readers of the biographical dictionaries where his life is recorded, for several disparate reasons. He was best known, then as now, for being the brother of an astounding but notorious legal genius and social activist; no aspect of his life would be read as being isolated from the famous controversies that involved his family. ‘Abd Allah and a third brother once accompanied Ahmad when he was sent to prison in Cairo for five months after being hounded by colleagues over theological issues.* The other brother, Zayn al-Din, accompanied Ahmad to prison voluntarily on two other occasions. Given this background, ‘Abd Allah’s efforts to display disdain for the world of learning as well as the mundane world and its luxuries might be read as a stylized rejection of specific realities and not merely as misanthropy or as a classic renunciation of society. His actions become infinitely more noteworthy in the context of the learned society to which he belonged, both in fourteenth-century Cairo, where he was imprisoned along with his brothers, and in his home city, Damascus, where he died while Ahmad was again in prison serving a final period of incarceration.
Law and Piety in Medieval Islam is a study of the intersection of personal piety and the culture of Islamic law in the late medieval period. Using primary sources that range from chronicles and biographical dictionaries to legal manuals, fatwa collections, and hortatory treatises, I examine what it meant to be an exemplary Muslim in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. The book focuses in particular on the role of the body in Islamic ritual practice as well as on more personalized kinds of ritual behavior. In terms of the “culture of Islamic law,” I mean this in a broad sense. I address the more informal aspects of this culture: first of all, by examining quotidian uses of law by pious Muslims during a period that was crucial to the development of the corpus of Islamic legal texts, many of which are still in use today; and second, by seeking to explain how the scholars of religious law fit into their society. Without understanding broader themes in medieval Islamic religious culture, it is difficult to appreciate how or why legal writings were important to ordinary piety — and, indeed, vice versa.’
This study deals with the Ayyubid and the Mamluk periods for reasons that have to do more with developments in religious practice than with political history, although these were not always unrelated. This span of time, from roughly 1170 to 1500 C.E., is what I will refer to as the late medieval period. By examining evidence from the surrounding centuries, the precise character of late medieval religious culture becomes clearer, and for this reason examples from the mid-1roos and the early sixteenth century are presented as well. Ayyubid rule accounts for roughly one-third of the period under consideration here. During it we see what might be described as the adolescence of several institutions that will be discussed in this book, ones that would see even more growth under the Mamluks: the land-grant (igtd‘) system of the military administration that gave individuals the right to collect taxes on designated lands; charitable support for the needy and for religious scholarship through the construction of endowed buildings; and an expanding judicial system. The Ayyubids were a large extended family, members of which ruled much of the Middle East from 569/1174 to 658/1260. Within a decade of Saladin’s founding the dynasty in Cairo, they controlled the western Arabian peninsula (the Hijaz, with its holy cities of Mecca and Medina), Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. The Ayyubid ruler, the sultan, based in Cairo, was the major power; the provinces were ruled by princes from the family, sometimes as a confederation, sometimes as more or less independent petty states. Sultans and princes alike took the title “al-Malik,” meaning ruler or king. Across the region sons succeeded fathers, cousins succeeded cousins, nephews succeeded uncles, and in one case an uncle succeeded his nephew.
By contrast, many sultans — and virtually all of the political administration — of the Mamluk empire were former military slaves of Central Asian Turkic origin. While sometimes their sons were installed as sultans, a large number gained power after having served in the personal entourage of a previous ruler. It would be impossible to describe here fully the unique system of slave (mamlik) and owner (a freed mamlik) that characterized the Mamluk period, or the strength of social bonds that tied slaves not only to their masters but to each other in the military “households” in which they grew up, but there is substantial secondary literature on this topic.’ The elite cadre of mamliiks who rose to the position of commander (amir) were major players in political life and benefactors of religious culture. The sons of mamiliks could not, in theory, inherit rule or their fathers’ military positions, but were integrated into the cultural elite of the cities under Mamluk control. Throughout Mamluk rule, from I260 to 1517, power was firmly consolidated at Cairo; the provinces were administered by amirs who were appointed by and generally loyal to the ruler. The period was characterized by factionalism among groups of mamliks belonging to various powerful military households. As with Ayyubid rule, there were frequent changes of power, some violent, but this did not necessarily mean instability for the empire as a whole.
In terms of geography, I have attempted to limit myself to the lands under Ayyubid and Mamluk control. Cairo and Damascus provide an obvious focal point for this study because of their importance as centers of learning, the high level of patronage associated with their rulers, the number of prolific authors who made these cities their home, and, most importantly, because they attracted pious travellers from across the Islamic world.® Yet it is this last attribute that makes the geographical range of my study also inevitably wider, since I hope to demonstrate how pious practices were easily understood and transmitted across Islamic cultures. Authors such as al-Udfiwi, who wrote a fourteenth-century biographical dictionary for Upper Egypt, provide geographical breadth and confirm that the same types of piety existed elsewhere. Similarly, ‘Abd Allah Ibn Farhin, al-Fasi, and al-Sakhawi are good examples of authors whose cities of choice, Medina and Mecca, were, like Cairo and Damascus, crossroads of pious activity. Examples from Iraq, Spain, and India are also relevant in demonstrating the scope of this shared piety. This is not to suggest that there were no local developments or unique manifestations of piety in specific places. The distinctive qualities of Sufi piety that emerged in Anatolia, for example, have been well documented by Ahmet Karamustafa and Cemel Kafadar.”
Given that Sufi mysticism may be the most familiar aspect of medieval Islamic piety, its relative unimportance in ‘Abd Allah Ibn Taymiyya’s life story bears further consideration. He lived and was buried in a milieu in which Sufism and other currents of piety intermingled, as a number of studies of medieval Damascus have recently shown.* While the topic of Sufism has received a good deal of attention, most of the other elements in his biography have not. Most important of these is the fact that he is described as being “draped in the gown of asceticism.”? For more than a century the prevalent argument has been that as Sufism rose to dominate Islamic piety, the strict asceticism of early Islam was left behind. Farfrom rejecting it altogether, Sufism — according to this model - absorbed asceticism and its practices, imbued them with new spiritual meaning, and made them standard parts of the Sufi Path. By implication, asceticism for its own sake was no longer an ideal that had much currency after the ninth or tenth century."°
If ‘Abd Allah Ibn Taymiyya were simply an exception, a leftover ascetic type from the early Islamic centuries, he might merit no more than a footnote, but references to similar figures abound in the late medieval sources. These figures are remarkable for the extreme devotion manifested in their vows of solitude or fasting, their love of prayer, voluntary poverty, meager diets, itinerancy, or other forms of bodily mortification. They could be the sons of amirs, shopkeepers, widows, slaves, or, like ‘Abd Allah, jurists. Some are described as Sufis and others are not. But they all bear a strong resemblance to the ascetics of early Islam — whom, I will argue, they very consciously sought to emulate. Their numbers suggest that a distinct ascetic tradition continued to exist and thrive, one that owed no necessary allegiance to Sufism even if these two types of piety often overlapped. For the Ayyubid period, Anne-Marie Eddé and Daniella Talmon-Heller have both shown that asceticism, sainthood, voluntary poverty (becoming a fagir), and minor miracles were common among holy men generally, and were not just the purview of the Sufis. Eddé argues that ascetic saints and Sufis in Aleppo were two separate categories of holy people, and she urges historians to take note of the distinctions between them."
This is an important point, for asceticism may have been crucial to the Sufi Path, but it was also crucial to the culture of Islamic law; ascetical attitudes and practices were seen as appropriate for the keepers of divine law. I would stress also the fact that common supererogatory practices such as nighttime prayer and voluntary fasting have a long history in Islamic piety, and were not seen in late medieval Islam as being predominantly Sufi ones. Sufis will make frequent appearances in the following chapters as jurists, hermits, and scholars, alongside other pious men and women, but this is not a book about Sufism.'* What Sufism actually was in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods still has not been clearly defined, in fact.'? My comments in this introduction are intended to render problematic the category of the Sufi, which too often remains a catch-all category for pious persons.
The Meaning of Devotional Piety
Sources from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries catalog a broad spectrum of religious behavior, from the ordinary to the stellar to the transgressive. Making sense of that spectrum requires a vocabulary that allows us to describe common patterns in piety. Yet we still lack the descriptive language with which to discuss piety in broad terms. One may be able to discern various strands or styles present in late medieval Islam: juridical piety, Sufi piety, Hanbali piety, learned piety, antinomian piety, the piety of the hadith folk (people engaged in the study and transmission of reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds and also those of his Companions), and so on. ‘Abd Allah Ibn Taymiyya exhibited all of these, yet no single one describes him well. I will argue that Shaykh ‘Abd Allah represents a category of piety that was widely valorized by medieval Islamic society. His asceticism was not an aberration, but rather is evidence of a powerful continuity in Islam which lent to medieval piety a deeply ingrained and richly contoured sense of the importance of individual actions. What draws together the variety of ascetics, jurists, hermits, and other religious figures in medieval Islamic society is something I will call devotional piety. I take this phrase from the Arabic word ta‘abbud (bodily devotion; supererogatory worship), which so frequently appears in descriptions of holy people, rather than from taqwad, another word also translated as piety but which may be more precisely defined as piousness or a god-fearing attitude. Devotional piety is in a sense an umbrella term for a diffuse set of attitudes in medieval Islamic culture, attitudes that are expressed through personal religious practice and that I believe lie at the heart of both individual asceticism and certain forms of Sufism.
Devotional piety was distinguished by the pursuit of God’s favor through practices that were superadditional to the required rituals of Islam, by an emphasis on the body as an instrument of worship, and by the rejection of worldly pleasures - or even society itself. This form of piety was accessible to all Muslims, not only because of the role its exemplars often played in their communities as the beneficiaries of charity, as the destinations of pious travel, or as sources of advice and blessing, but also because these exemplars were emulated by large numbers of Muslims. Excess in a particular action, such as making the Pilgrimage many times on foot or staying awake all night in prayer, could make an individual man or woman famous. It was often a solitary path, not only because of the importance of removing oneself from society but also because inherent in the very nature of this piety was a degree of nonconformity, or at least individual choice. In other words, the element of uniqueness was proof of a person’s holiness. Although in most cases devotional activities were based on the required rituals of Islam or the practices of Muhammad and his Companions, there was considerable latitude in the way individuals chose to develop them.
Concentric Circles of Piety
To some degree, devotional piety appears to be distinct from learned piety, the locale of which might be the madrasa, the mosque, or the state-supported judicial hierarchy.’ Medieval authors perceived this difference: Ibn al-Jawzi, introducing his famous biographical dictionary of godly men and women, the Sifat al-safwa, says that he will include in it all types of pious people “except those who became famous for knowledge alone and did not become famous through asceticism and bodily devotion.”'’ The criterion Ibn al-Jawzi used is precisely the topic of my study. Asceticism (zuhd) and bodily devotion (ta‘abbud) are the foundation of medieval religious culture; it was excellence in these areas, and not learning alone, that made someone — even a scholar — worthy of emulation as well as praise. Chapter 1 deals with the longevity of asceticism in Islamic piety and its meaning in late medieval culture. Chapter 2 explains bodily devotion in depth, using the example of voluntary fasting.
Ibn al-Jawzi’s decision about whom to include in his book is puzzling, however, considering the great heights to which the pursuit of religious knowledge had risen in his lifetime. As for the centuries after his death, Jonathan Berkey describes the cultural importance of an extensive and vibrant educational network in Mamluk Cairo, one that was bound together by patterns of teaching and study more durable than the institutional structures that often served as places of instruction. This network drew into its midst both traditional families of scholars and new recruits from less significant backgrounds, among them the sons of slaves and immigrants to the city from the provinces and farther abroad. Michael Chamberlain writes of the way in which prominent families made use of a similar network in Damascus to gain social status and political authority.'° Within these networks, scholarly achievement and the accumulation of knowledge would appear to be the main criteria of pious fame, not least of all because the transmission of knowledge itself was “first and foremost an act of piety.” *7
Although Sufi scholars figure prominently in the networks of both cities, solitary ascetics and local holy men (Sufis among them) do not. The learned were revered, but learned piety was not necessarily the most representative of medieval Islamic practice. While Ibn al-Jawzi could hardly be described as averse to scholarship, being himself a prodigious legal scholar and historian, his emphasis sets up a dichotomy between the book and the body that — however artificial it may be — is well worth pursuing. In a religion so often described as being tied to scripture, religious authority in Islam would seem to be most efficiently gained through learning and secured with words, either verbal or written. But the ways in which it could be achieved through the body and bodily practice has received far less attention than it deserves, despite the existence of texts such as Ibn al-Jawzi’s Sifat al-safwa, which focuses almost entirely on the bodily practices of holy men and women.
The problem is not that modern scholars have failed to identify bodily piety as an important theme in medieval Islam. On the contrary, Chamberlain stresses that it was by means of the cultural practices associated with knowledge (‘ilm) that scholars achieved their social distinction. To the young aspirant who sought to emulate him, a teacher “was as much a model of bodily norms as he was a carrier of truths.” A scholar’s credentials did not consist solely in the textual knowledge he had acquired but in “the whole complex of manners, moral conduct, deportment, and scripted forms of self-presentation that in sum made up the notion of adab.”"* And indeed it was Berkey who first described in such rich detail how the transmission of religious knowledge in medieval Islam was a cultural practice that continually exceeds modern notions of scholarship in the academy; at times, he notes, the study session was a devotional occasion rather than a purely scholastic endeavor.’? I rely on the work of these two historians and others who have worked on the culture of religious scholarship as the framework for my approach.
Still, the piety of the body has never been treated extensively as a topic of its own, perhaps because it is not characteristic of any one group in society in particular. Berkey and Chamberlain both focused, in a sense, on the human infrastructure of elite religious life in Cairo and Damascus, and if my analysis is cast in terms of a broader human geography, this approach is only possible because of their scholarship on some of society’s most visible groups: the scholars (‘ulamd’) and notables (a‘yan). I proceed from the premise that the antinomian ascetic, the professor of law, and the devoted housewife were all people who interacted with cultural notions of piety, if less often with each other. For these reasons, my study is organized around features of their piety rather than the social classes or groups who adopted it.
What Ibn al-Jawzi probably meant to suggest by his decision to omit famous learned men was merely that without the piety of bodily devotion (ta‘abbud) and asceticism (zubd), knowledge alone was an insufficient criterion for fame. Indeed, knowledge as a strategy for acquiring fame and social capital might have been precisely what Ibn al-Jawzi was proscribing in his decisions about whose lives he would record for posterity in the Sifat al-safwa. In the Arabic sources from the two centuries after Ibn al-Jawzi, one can find with relative ease perfect examples of both devotional piety and learned piety: a woman so devoted to the hajj that she left her husband behind and travelled to Mecca without him on her second Pilgrimage;*° a scholar such as Taqi al-Din al-Subki, whose family had a long history of judgeships and professorships. Yet these two types of piety were not mutually exclusive choices, given the fact that so many figures appearing in our texts were drawn to both. The lives of scholars and other sorts of pious people, whether mendicants, wandering Sufis, or solitary ascetics, often intersected in the cities where temporary and permanent lodging was provided for them and on the roads crossing the Middle East where men and women travelled in search of knowledge or on pilgrimage.*' Scholarly and solitary pursuits were often concentrated in the same person. Reclusive ascetics might still be teachers of hadith or law no matter how far from town they lived, and a great many scholars who achieved fame for their knowledge also demonstrated an equal fervor for bodily devotion.
But these pursuits do, however, say different things about the ideals of Islamic piety in this period. There was a rather beautiful tension between the value placed on expertise in Islamic learning and the common practice of proving one’s faith with the body and not the mind; between the path of piety that could lead towards a position of great renown in the mosques or madrasas of Cairo, Baghdad or Damascus, and the one that led not just towards solitude but towards a true disregard for the pedestal many others sought. That tension remains unresolved throughout this period. Chapter 3 will demonstrate how the constant pull of those two poles of isolation and social responsibility, an essential element in Islamic piety, was revivified by new problems in late medieval society.
‘Abd Allah Ibn Taymiyya was above all an exemplar of these concentric circles of piety. Two aspects of his piety provide clues that will be followed throughout this study: his abandoning society for the solitude of deserted mosques; and the activities he performed inside them. Al-Safadi described the shaykh’s sojourns, which sometimes lasted for days, not as the Sufi spiritual retreat known as khalwa, but as periods in hiding, a self-imposed exile.** Evoking an analogy with the Prophet’s emigration from Mecca to the safety of Medina, this sharp statement of antisocial unhappiness gained its sting because of ‘Abd Allah’s background as a jurist and his inevitable association with other jurists, some of whom were instrumental in the indictments against his brother. What led him to those isolated places is just as important. It was his devotion to supererogatory worship (ta‘abbud) that on these occasions prevailed over his communal responsibilities and scholarly pursuits; in fact, he deliberately left his house whenever he expected to be visited or consulted.*3 As if in response to Ibn al-Jawzi’s dictum about what made someone an exemplar, his biographers — esteemed scholars to a man — called particular attention to the fact that ‘Abd Allah authored no books at all. All of this was designed to show that ‘Abd Allah did not wear the label of the scholar or mufti comfortably, despite substantial evidence of his legal expertise.*4 This perpetual discomfort was part of what made him a holy man. And certainly it bolstered the reputation of his family as one of singularly high standards both in piety and as actors in contemporary legal and political debates.
One expects to find holiness in the figure of a solitary shaykh: torn from the context of teaching and learning in the cities, the piety exhibited through his personal behavior is obviously what one is meant to find interesting. But increasingly, and over the course of the thirteenth century in particular, it was the jurists who were depicted as holy men, and it was they who best served as exemplars of the world-renouncing piety that focused so heavily on the body of the worshipper. At first glance it would appear that this was so simply because scholarly skills and bodily devotion converged in the person of the religious jurist. This is only partially true. ‘Abd Allah’s ascetic departure from the city brought him into close proximity, spatially if not literally, with the more antinomian ascetic characters of Islamic society, for there were many other holy men who frequented similarly desolate places. They sometimes refused to conform to Islamic standards of dress and cleanliness, or even neglected ritual duties altogether. Several modern scholars have emphasized that these unusual figures were not entirely on the margins of society, since some were deeply revered by the residents of Damascus and Cairo.*5 But where others have attempted to show how their actions were reversals of normative Islamic behavior (albeit ones that served to reinforce what should be normative), I have sought in the concluding chapter to detect the logic of their actions in light of the central themes in medieval Islamic piety. I argue that a person who appeared to reject social conventions or religious duties did so in response to and in conversation with the dominant discourse, which was that of Islamic law. The statements antinomian ascetics made with their bodies were sometimes meant to explain Islamic law rather than to overturn it. It was in fact interaction with the law — knowing it, following it faithfully, or even breaking it - that dominated their personal decisions about how to worship God.
Biography and the Challenges of Hagiography
Modern scholars of medieval Islamic history are accustomed to approaching biographical sources with a certain amount of skepticism, especially when it comes to stories of famous holy men and women of the distant past. The difference between biography and hagiography in these sources is difficult to discern, for the historical gap between subject and author was often filled with embellishments and marvelous details. Lost in that gap were some of the more unsavory episodes of a person’s career when they no longer fit the agenda of a later author who compiled the biographical portrait; at times miracles were granted to the pious not by God but by human authors who had a point to prove.** Islamic biographical compendia, one must conclude, cannot be used as a treasury of accurate detail about the subjects’ lives.
Yet at the same time no phrase could better describe the biographical genre in late medieval Islam than “a treasury of detail.” By this time, the authors were voracious collectors of information, both biographical and historical. Chase Robinson has described an “explosion” of contemporary history writing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where the vogue among historians was not to rewrite the story of Islam and its famous men and women from the beginning, though many did, but rather to turn to recent decades for their subject matter.*7 Authors frequently chose to provide supplements for existing works of chronography and prosopography, adding only a few years to the works of their predecessors, or in several cases expanding on their own; some biographical dictionaries even contained reports of people still living.** It is obvious from the way authors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries such as Ibn Rajab, Ibn Hajar, al-Sakhawi, and Ibn al-Iraqi mined the works of their immediate predecessors that thoroughness and breadth were much prized. They were quick to point out the mistakes and biases not only of their competitors (who often wrote works nearly identical to their own) but also of their informants.*? In addition, their works represent an astonishing amount of new research from disparate sources. Al-Fasi, for example, gathered information from inscriptions on buildings and gravestones in Mecca.3° In the end, historians and biographers may have written more for each other and for later generations of scholar-researchers than for a popular audience.3'
The authors’ personal contacts and trusted informants were trumpeted as the bedrock of medieval biography. Much like modern journalists, al-Safadi kept pre-written obituaries of prominent persons on file before they died, and his informants too seem to have been ready with appropriate quotations.** This suggests that, while they lived their lives, both scholars and their informants were aware that biographical detail collecting was ongoing, particularly in the milieu of religious scholarship. One suspects that not a few of them acted accordingly. We are no more able to prove the veracity of their reports than we are of earlier sources, but the biographical genre was by now full of personal observations, and these observations could be framed in ways that are alternately fresh and extremely formalized. The medieval authors all spoke a common language when it came to discussing piety. That is, informants and authors responded in conventional ways when called upon to provide accounts of religious figures. But in the details one can see what was considered truly new or out of the ordinary, or truly holy, along with plentiful confirmation of what the dominant motifs in Ayyubid and Mamluk piety were.
Certain authors such as Ibn Hajar and Ibn Rajab (d. 795/1392) can be useful for much earlier periods because they were particularly scrupulous about citing their sources, some of which are no longer extant. In many cases these historians offered a more thorough and thoroughly researched perspective on the subjects of their obituaries or biographies than that of the original authors. The issue of revisionism does arise with all these sources, and in the revisions some of the most vivid expressions of shifts in piety can be found. Chapter 4 deals with precisely this issue. Using the theme of scrupulosity in the performance of the rituals of purification, it demonstrates how rewritten biographies follow developments in Islamic law as well as Islamic piety. In this case it becomes clear that, over the course of several centuries, attitudes about fulfilling perfectly the requirements of ritual law and the intended purpose of the rituals themselves were sometimes incompatible.
As for the question of miracles and hagiography, Eric Geoffroy has surveyed the individual biases of authors from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries who either favored or disparaged extreme forms of piety.33 Similar biases can be traced in earlier authors as well. For instance, al-Yafit considered al-Dhahabi to be overly terse in praising miracle workers and gnostics.s4 On a case-by-case basis, however, one finds that the biases have little consistency. If Ibn Kathir, for example, was often intolerant of flamboyant holy men, he nevertheless wrote a glowing report of a follower of the most antinomian figure of the early thirteenth century, ‘Ali al-Hariri.35 Contemporary conflicts about the recently deceased are what make the medieval sources so fascinating and useful, and by the thirteenth century, if not earlier, patterns of notoriety were just as well honed as those of praise.
In any case, what is more important than the individual outlook of each author is the overwhelming consistency with which medieval biographers point out the same main features of what made people holy. They do so through an infinite variety of specific examples, and it is these examples that are my focus. I use biographies both as a reflection of how the authors, almost invariably pious men, viewed other pious people and as a credible source of information about exemplary action. While I believe that the genre of obituary writing by the thirteenth century is fundamentally different from that of hagiography, in terms of its general purpose and its audience, an overlap between the two genres is surely a valuable way of discerning the major themes in what constituted holiness.>°
The difference between biography and hagiography in medieval Islamic literature is a topic that has not been exhausted. But I would argue simply that we need not read praise, even the hyperbolic praise of the medieval Muslim biographical tradition, as being aimed only at the creation of saints. Nor should we dismiss reports of miracles in biographical texts as attempts at hagiography.37 Furnishing a miracle story that was already in circulation was, it would seem, considered a duty by some authors and not others. Holy men who were credited with miracle working do raise an interesting challenge in a study of piety. Several of the figures I study appear in Richard Gramlich’s typology of Islamic miracles, but I have used the same source material for different kinds of information.>* Where he traces patterns in extraordinary phenomena, it is precisely the patterns of the other attributes of these men (for miracle workers were apparently only men) that is my focus: their asceticism and daily devotional habits, their nonmiraculous interactions with ordinary Muslims, and the effect such interactions had in shaping conceptions of pious comportment. As Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen has pointed out, Gramlich’s approach, in failing to take into account the historical context of medieval miracles, reduces the impact of the message they were intended to convey. Her analysis of miraculous interventions in missions involving the liberating of captives (by the saint Ahmad al-Badawi, for example) shows how skepticism about these miracles confirms that larger social issues were being discussed; miracle stories are neither “timeless” nor do they serve solely hagiographical purposes.
Other genres of literature prove equally fruitful, particularly those that relate to positive law (figh). Treatises on deviation from or innovations in religious practice (bid‘a treatises) are one of these. Such texts were typically addressed to a popular audience and are valuable in charting the changing moods of piety; several recent studies have analyzed this literature in depth.*° Collections of substantive law (furi‘ al-figh) written between the late twelfth and the fifteenth centuries have formed a significant portion of my research as well. These collections are generally legal manuals comprising the authoritative opinions and actual rules of a specific legal “school” or madbhab. A \egal scholar would present anew material from a previous manual, updating where necessary. Even though the changes in actual rulings are most often incremental from one text to the next, they can still shed valuable light on contemporary issues.*! In the longer manuals there is a great deal of commentary. Debates that took place among previous generations of jurists are preserved in full; new material, such as decisions recorded in fatwas, finds its way into these texts of furi‘ al-fiqh as well.4 I focus in particular on works by Ibn Qudama al-Maqdisi (d. 620/1223) and al-Nawawi (d. 676/1277) because of their personal involvement in devotional piety. Al-Nawawi himself was an exemplar of incomparable importance in the thirteenth century, as were Ibn Qudama and especially his older brother in the twelfth. Comparing biographical material with popular texts written by jurists and with their formal legal writings is yet another way of tracing trends in contemporary piety; this is the strategy I employ in Chapters 2 and 4.
There are a number of other genres of legal literature that I have used, but a word must be said about the use of hadith. Because the accounts of Muhammad’s words and deeds (and those of his family and Companions) are of paramount importance in Islamic law — legal debates were often won with arguments referring to (or offering interpretations of) particular hadiths — the late medieval commentaries on collections of hadith can certainly be classified within the field of jurisprudential literature. Finally, it is significant that, in many cases, the authors of biographical dictionaries and chronicles were jurists. As observers of events, of both praiseworthy trends and disturbing innovations in contemporary practice, these author-jurists sometimes registered their own legal opinions in the historical texts they wrote; we can at times detect the impact of events on their formal legal writings.+
As the chapters progress, the book focuses more closely on the relationship between the law as a set of texts and the social position of the men who wrote and enacted it. The jurists’ role in guiding medieval society went beyond the classic texts they wrote and the legal opinions they rendered. Legal experts were public figures whose actions — and devotional piety — were more carefully observed and copied than were those of any other group in society. My emphasis on legal writers as participants in piety — indeed, as the single most influential group of exemplary men — is what I hope will distinguish this study from other works on the same period. The most revered among them, figures such as al-Nawawi, were fully involved in the social issues of their day. Sometimes these men set standards through their own public actions. At times they were also influenced by others — a colleague or a member of their family, for example. In either case, these standards find their way into Islamic substantive law in subtle ways, a process that suggests that works on furi‘ al-figh can serve as a repository of Islamic ethics. Discussions of ritual law (laws pertaining to ablutions, prayer, and fasting, for example) in these texts are places we can expect to find evidence of changes in piety. Yet I also show how other topics in Islamic law, from charitable endowments to farming practices, can similarly reflect or reveal changes in religious ideals and ethical standards.
By the middle of the tenth century the four “schools” (madhahib, sing. madhhab) of Sunni jurisprudence that developed around the legal methods and opinions of four distinctive legal scholars from the eighth and ninth centuries C.E. are considered to have reached maturity. Much work has been done on this formative period of Islamic law, which spans the years from 750-950.
The later medieval period is the time when what I will call the culture of Islamic law came into being. For one thing the judiciary grew substantially in size and administrative sophistication. By the year 1200 knowledge of the law was no longer limited to a few legal experts. Some men acquired this knowledge informally by studying with one legal scholar at a time. Others learned about Islamic law as part of the training offered at the various institutions of higher education that were being founded in increasing numbers throughout this period. There was nothing to prevent women from studying it too, and some of them did, although they were not able to use their knowledge in a professional capacity by serving as judges. Certainly, a large number of women studied the two major sources of Islamic law: the Quran and the collections of hadith.
Being knowledgeable about the law was so much a part of medieval piety that even illiterate holy men made a point of showing that they were familiar with its precepts. Finally, by including law in a cultural history of medieval models of piety, I intend the book to dispel common misconceptions about the “dry legalism” of medieval Islam, an old Orientalist phrase still used today by some cultural historians of the Islamic Middle East.
On the contrary, the law proves to be one of the richest sources for the creative impulses of individuals throughout this period. This era produced great legal scholars whose commentaries are still widely used today. What was it about this culture that gave us a legacy of such lasting significance? How did this concept of piety have such depth and vibrance throughout all levels of society.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق