Download PDF | (Publications on the Near East) Jonathan Berkey - Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East-University of Washington Press (2001).
156 Pages
Preface
Books come to be written for a variety of di¤erent reasons and in a variety of di¤erent ways. This book, like any other, had its own particular genesis, and it may help the reader to be aware of the circumstances that produced it. I hope that this narrative history of the project will also serve to recognize and acknowledge my debts to the individuals and institutions who helped see it to fruition. After—in actual fact, even somewhat before—I had completed my monograph on The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo, which was published in 1992, I came to be interested in the subject of popular culture, and especially popular religion, in the medieval Islamic Near East.
That first book was a study of what some would call “high” culture, in this case, the organized and disciplined transmission of a body of texts and knowledge which formed the basis of both much intellectual life and the social and even political power of the religious elite in the later Middle Period of Islamic history. One of the most remarkable features of that system of transmitting religious knowledge, at least in medieval Cairo, was the degree to which those who were in some sense “outsiders”—that is, not by profession or occupation full-time religious scholars, or ulama— were nonetheless actively involved in the process of passing on the textual foundations of the faith and thereby maintaining the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of the medieval Islamic sociopolitical order. At the same time, through both my own reading of texts such as Ibn al-*ajj’s highly entertaining Madkhal al-sharª al-sharif, and also through the research of other scholars, most notably my friend and colleague Christopher Taylor’s study of cemeteries and the cult of the “saints” in medieval Cairo, I became aware of just how extensively many of the ulama themselves actively participated in religious customs and practices that some (such as Ibn al-*ajj) thought of as illegitimate and dangerous, as decidedly “un-Islamic.” It seemed to me that the two observations were intimately connected: that common people, for example, could share in the transmission of high culture was only the obverse of the coin, while the reverse demonstrated that the intellectual or academic elite could wallow in the “popular.” Consequently, when I began research on my next, and at that early stage rather unfocused, project, I hoped to invert the approach of my first book and to write the history of the transmission of religious knowledge in the medieval Islamic Near East, as it were, from the ground up.
I was teaching at Mount Holyoke College at the time, and a grant from the college enabled me to spend a summer in London, combing through the manuscript holdings of the British Library. While there, I came across a number of interesting works, including an anonymous treatise (B.L. Or. 4275) entitled al-Baªith ªala ’l-khala7 min suºal-}ann biºl-khawa77 (The Enciter to Liberation from the Low Opinion of the Elite). A cursory survey of its contents indicated that the work was a defense of popular preachers and storytellers, a topic obviously of some relevance to a study of popular religion, so I had the manuscript copied and filed it away for future reference. In the meantime, however, another manuscript caught my attention. B.L. Or. 7528, which is missing both its first and last folios, and so is unidentified, is described in the catalogue as a “catechism on points of religion and morals, lives of the prophets, Muhammad, eminent Muslims, etc.”
In fact, what it seems to represent is the record of a popular preaching and storytelling circle. I was fortunate enough, at that early stage of my career, to secure leave from my teaching duties on two occasions, first through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1992–93) and then through the generosity of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I spent the 1994–95 academic year hallucinating that I had died and gone to historians’ heaven. During those two years I continued my research into the broad area of popular culture and the Islamic religion in the Middle Period. Several studies emerged at that time, in particular an article laying out my initial thoughts about the relationship between di¤erent strands of medieval Islamic cultural activity which was originally delivered as a talk at various venues, including Indiana University, a seminar on “collective memory” at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the 1995 meetings of the Medieval Academy of America; the article, which was eventually published in Past and Present, benefited from the comments of the various audiences. But the overall shape of a larger study was proving elusive. Finally, I began to focus on B.L. Or. 7528 and to organize and write a book-length study of the manuscript itself as representing a sort of “snapshot” of the kind of material and ideas which would have circulated in those gatherings in which nonelite Muslims received and transmitted religious knowledge. This book, as I envisioned it, would be organized around a series of related topics—“nature and cosmos,” “words and the word,” “poverty and secrets,” “fear and hope.” That book has not yet been completed. After writing one chapter, I decided that an introductory study was necessary in order to set out the character and context of medieval Islamic popular preaching and storytelling circles, one of which produced the manuscript in question. That led me to go back and look more closely at B.L. Or. 4275. At first I did not know exactly what form this preliminary study would take—originally, I assumed it would emerge as an article—but, as J. R. R. Tolkien once said of his trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, “the tale grew in the telling.”
The result is this book. A work that has had as long and tortuous a gestation as this one inevitably burdens its author with debts, intellectual and practical, which he can only dream of ever being able to repay. The initial research that has resulted in this book was made possible by the grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most of my thinking on the subject and the organizing of the study was completed during my time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, an absolutely idyllic academic environment. I was especially fortunate that Michael Chamberlain and Maribel Fierro occupied o‹ces just down the hall from mine; I drew shamelessly on the erudition and insight of both. The bulk of the book itself, however, was written in London during the summer of 1996, during a research trip made possible by a grant from my new employer, Davidson College. In the intervening years, portions of the book were presented in various venues. Chapter 3, in altered form, was delivered to a session at the 1997 meeting of the Middle East Studies Association sponsored by the Middle East Documentation Center of the University of Chicago and has subsequently appeared in volume 4 of Mamluk Studies Review.
Chapter 4 was presented, at the kind invitation of David Wasserstein and Camilla Adang, at a workshop at Tel Aviv University in December 1998 on the topic of “Elites in the World of Classical and Medieval Islam” and benefited enormously from the stimulating and challenging discussion that ensued. Meetings such as that at Tel Aviv are almost invariably the most productive settings for serious academic exchange, and I would like to thank its various participants, and especially Leah Kinberg, Daniella Talmon-Heller, Maribel Fierro, Ella Landau-Tasseron, and Julia Ashtiany Bray, for their extremely useful comments. A variety of individuals have provided assistance in one form or another, some of them, perhaps, in ways of which they were not even aware, although none of them should be held responsible for any shortcomings in the final product. My failing memory will no doubt lead me to overlook some, but, in addition to those whose names I have already recorded, I would mention in particular Paul Cobb, Emil Homerin, Charles Issawi, Bernard Lewis, Shaun Marmon, John Meloy, Rachel Newcomb, Chris Taylor, and Michael Winter.
I am especially grateful to the sta¤ at the various libraries at which I have worked or from which I have obtained copies of manuscripts, especially the libraries of Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale. I am not the only member of the faculty at Davidson College to owe Joe Gutekanst, of the Interlibrary Loan Department at the college’s E. H. Little Library, a profound debt of gratitude. Joe is the essential facilitator of much of the research in the humanities and social sciences which takes place in our small corner of the Carolina Piedmont. Michael Duckworth of the University of Washington Press has been patient and tolerant of my natural tendency (a professional hazard, one might say) to delay and to postpone, and the press’s three anonymous readers saved me from a number of embarrassing errors. Historians write books for their academic colleagues, but inevitably their families are drawn into their projects in one way or another. I am fortunate that my family has been so supportive of my work. My wife, Vivien, has shared with me the bewildering task of juggling our various responsibilities of research, teaching, and caring for young children. Both my parents and my in-laws have contributed their own time and e¤ort—for example, by caring for our son in London during the summer of 1996 and so allowing me the invaluable opportunity to begin the writing of this book in close proximity to the sources on which it is based. Aidan and now Olivia have contributed to the project in their own way too, if only by constantly giving me good reason to smile.
Introduction One of the dominant themes of recent Western scholarship about the Islamic world has been that of the multiplicity and variety of religious experience and cultural expression within the Islamic tradition. In part, this has reflected a self-conscious e¤ort to avoid the sin of essentialism, of assuming and asserting that “Islam” constitutes a clearly defined and substantially unchanging cultural entity, a sin of which an earlier generation of area specialists (identified pejoratively as “Orientalists”) are often held to have been guilty.1
Whether or not the academic Orientalists were, as a group, responsible for constructing such a monolithic understanding of Islam, and then bequeathing their flawed judgment to Western culture as a whole, as Edward Said and others have argued, there can be little doubt that the scholarly reaction to this perception of their mistake has been salutary. The last several decades have witnessed a growing tide of academic studies exploring in depth aspects of the religion and culture of Muslims in various times and places, studies that do not rely upon essentialist assumptions but which seek to understand particular groups of Muslims, their lives and ideas, in specific social and historical settings. On one level, this represents simply the maturing of an academic discipline. On another, it reflects the way in which the discipline of anthropology, or at least ethnography, with its focus on the specific character of particular communities, cultures, and constructed systems of identity and meaning—what anthropologists have called the task of “thick description”—has profoundly influenced historical inquiry.2
Anthropologists, said Cli¤ord Geertz in his comparative study of Islam in Morocco and Indonesia, are “always inclined to turn toward the concrete, the particular, the microscopic. . . . We hope to find in the little what eludes us in the large, to stumble upon general 3 truths while sorting through special cases.”3 Historians have increasingly followed in their footsteps. One aspect of this process of maturation has been a movement away from narrative histories and studies of the “high” cultural tradition. Historians of Muslim peoples, both medieval and modern, have discovered “popular” culture. Some studies have focused on critiques of popular practices and rituals by generally hostile members of the ulama, the scholarly elite trained in the Muslim religious and legal sciences; others have made a broader e¤ort to reconstruct popular culture from the ground up.4 Beyond the distinction between high and popular culture, there lies the extraordinary and exemplary connectedness of medieval Islamic societies, at least those of the Near East.
The practices and even personalities associated with one end of the cultural spectrum cannot usually be confined to it: scholars could be found participating in the very popular rituals associated with the cult of Muslim saints; common people participated, in some limited but meaningful way, in the transmission of religious knowledge; Sufi practices condemned by pious scholars have been shown to be intimately connected to, even derived from, mainstream Sufi values.5 A variety of cultural practices, although experienced in di¤erent forms by di¤erent people in di¤erent venues, nonetheless shared certain commonalities that provided a kind of cultural “glue” su‹ciently strong to bind together individuals and social groups of widely di¤erent circumstances and outlook. Any list of such shared cultural practices must include public moral exhortation. As with other areas of Islamic cultural activity, preaching transpired on a number of di¤erent levels, ranging from formal sermons during the Friday congregational prayers to street-corner harangues and the recitation of religiously edifying tales, and the di¤erences between them are not always clear. Nonetheless, it is with the lower end of that range, a field populated with individuals identified in the sources as “preachers” (waªi}, pl. wuªªa}) or “storytellers” (qa77, pl. qu77a7), that this study is principally concerned.
The development of organized religious storytelling and popular preaching in the Islamic world was perhaps inevitable. In saying so, I do not by any means intend to repeat and a‹rm the racial prejudices and assumptions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European scholarship about the “Semitic genius” for storytelling—the “keen eye for particulars,” the “great subjectivity,” the “nervous restlessness, deep passion and inwardness of feeling,” which supposedly gave to the ancient Hebrews 4 Introduction and the Muslim Arabs a “talent for lively and attractive prose narration.”6 Rather, I simply mean to draw attention to certain characteristic features of the religion of Islam and the sources available for the reconstruction of Muslim history. Islam, with the Shariªa at its heart, is an intensely ethical religion, and its moral imperatives drive Muslims both to self-improvement within the faith and to encouraging better “Islamic” behavior among their coreligionists. The Qurºanic injunction to “command the good and forbid the evil” (al-amr biºl-maªruf waºl-nahy ªan al-munkar) shoulders the believer with the obligation of implementing the religion’s moral concerns and, by implication, with the task of discerning what exactly those concerns are.7
Instruction on this point can be and is primarily sought from the Qurºan, but the holy book can prove frustrating as a guide to correct belief and improved conduct. Its organization is, in some respects, arbitrary and confusing. With few exceptions, there is little narrative coherence in its recounting of tales of the prophets and other historical and pseudohistorical figures; the stories of Adam, Abraham, Jesus, and others are spread over many di¤erent suras. Nor is there any convenient summary of its legal and ethical injunctions, nothing like a Decalogue or a Sermon on the Mount to capture and retain the attention of more casual readers or listeners. As a source of normative guidelines, the Qurºan is to be supplemented by hadiths, stories about the words and deeds of the Prophet MuÇammad and his companions, but they too can prove bewildering. Not only do they cover an enormous range of issues and themes, but hadiths can be found to justify contradictory positions on a variety of questions. Moreover, of course, these traditions naturally lend themselves to recitation and retelling of precisely the sort engaged in by storytellers and preachers. Not all of the prophetic hadiths boil down to simple and (perhaps) uninspiring injunctions such as “Any one of you attending the Friday [prayers] should take a bath” or “I have told you repeatedly to use a toothpick.”8 Entertaining stories about Abraham, Noah, Moses, and the other Israelite “prophets,” as well as about MuÇammad and his companions, abound in most broad collections of hadiths.
The precise historical relationship between such accounts and other literary genres common in the early Islamic record lies well beyond the scope of this study; it is enough for us to note that the telling of stories—in hadiths, in the accounts of the early Muslim campaigns (maghazi), in tales of the Israelite prophets (qi7a7 al-anbiyaº), and later in the extensive biographical literature about scholIntroduction 5 ars, pious Muslims, and other prominent individuals—has always played an important role in most channels of the Islamic literary tradition.9 The role of stories was perhaps especially central to and identified with the tradition of exhortatory preaching: even a collection of “secular” tales such as the Thousand and One Nights contains a number of narratives of a devotional or exhortatory character.10 In di¤erent contexts European historians have recently rediscovered the importance of stories to history. Lawrence Stone has spoken of a “revival of narrative” in historical writing, and Natalie Zemon Davis has investigated the strategic use of storytelling in archival sources themselves.11 Historical writing about the Islamic world, by contrast, has always been heavily anecdotal, in part because of the importance of stories in the sources upon which historians must rely.
These two factors—the ethical imperative of the Islamic religion and the prominence of stories in the various literary genres—have contributed to making preaching a central part of the Muslim experience in most times and places. Such a statement can be made, I think, without lapsing back into “Orientalist” stereotypes and unsupported generalizations about the Islamic experience. Muslims always had before them, of course, the example of MuÇammad, whom the literary tradition frequently depicts exhorting and preaching to his people.12 Next to the miÇrab, the architectural niche usually assumed to indicate the direction of prayer, the minbar, or pulpit, is probably the most recognizable feature of a mosque, or at least of those mosques that, at noon on Fridays, provided the venue for communal prayers and delivery of a formal sermon, or khupba; unlike the miÇrab, the minbar probably dates back to the period before the Prophet’s death.13 When an Iranian cleric climbs the pulpit in a mosque in Tehran to deliver a sermon on Friday, he does so in the conscious knowledge that he participates in a tradition that links him with earlier generations of religious leaders and with the Prophet himself. The precise significance of the cleric’s awareness, however, is somewhat problematic, and invoking it at this early stage of the present work raises a larger theoretical issue. In good postmodernist fashion, some have wondered whether the very notion of Islam may, as a practical matter, be overvalued, if not altogether useless.
Is it possible to identify an “Islamic tradition” that provides any meaningful insight into seventh-century Arabia, ninth-century Baghdad, the glorious city of Cairo under the Mamluk sultans, as well as postrevolutionary Iran? Anthropologists have perhaps led the way in questioning whether a notion as broad as Islam or 6 Introduction Islamic civilization can provide any meaningful and significant insight into the diverse societies that label themselves Muslim.14 Similarly, the preference among contemporary historians for tightly focused studies of Islamic societies has given rise to a suspicion of the very possibility of identifying an Islamic tradition or civilization as a meaningful framework for historical analysis. Edmund Burke III, for example, has provided an insightful critique of the unapologetically “civilizational” approach best represented by the late Marshall Hodgson. Burke acknowledged that Hodgson avoided the pitfall of ascribing “timeless” qualities to Islamic civilization and built into his model an understanding of Islamic history as a dynamic process through his emphasis upon the “dialogue” between di¤erent cultural strata. Nonetheless, Burke found the model unconvincing, in part because it is “too much the a¤air of Weberian virtuosos,” atypical representatives of high cultural traditions rather than “ordinary Muslim men and women,” and in part because Hodgson’s concept of Islamic civilization rested too squarely on a set of moral values, the selection of which was, in the final analysis, purely arbitrary.15
Such objections can be met, I think, without abandoning entirely the heuristic value of the notion of an Islamic civilization. In the present case, for example, the study of popular preachers and storytellers inevitably moves away from the sphere of “Weberian virtuosos.” Although some of the individuals who sermonized and related didactic religious stories to the common people were themselves prominent scholars of the sort who interested Hodgson, many of them, as we shall see, were not. Indeed, one of the most intriguing features of the practice is the enormous range of practitioners it attracted. Moreover, the subject of study was a practice, not a moral ideal; it represented a forum in which values were contested, perhaps, but which in itself made no assumptions about the ideal orientation of Islam. But I think it important to assert more broadly at the outset that there is an Islamic tradition, a set of ideas, symbols, and interrelated texts and practices which may have a normative (although contested) force. It is true, of course, as anthropologists observe, that “religious symbols,” including those that constitute the highly self-conscious Islamic tradition, “are normally expressed in a universal idiom whereas the experience of them occurs in particular times and places.”
Consequently, “the original historical circumstances [under which they were first enunciated] and the mentalities of later adherents inevitably di¤er, sometimes enormously, as also do their perceptions and their responses to the sacred message.”16 But this simply Introduction 7 means that the true history of a religious tradition is to be sought in those moments of tension which arise as a result of its collision with the contingencies of historical circumstance and development. Even Geertz, for all his emphasis upon the particular and even countervailing historical forces at work in Morocco and Indonesia—the antipodes of the Islamic world, he called them—nonetheless acknowledged that both existed within an “ordered universe” and that the meaning of their historical experiences was to be gleaned at least in part from their relationship to that larger order. The task then of the anthropologist—or the historian—is to identify “the appropriate framework within which to view material phenomenally disparate in such a way that its very disparateness leads us into a deeper understanding of it.”17 Popular preaching and religious storytelling, I think, may constitute one such “appropriate framework,” a point of entry allowing a detailed glimpse of the ordered but contested world of medieval Islam. Preaching and religious storytelling constitute a distinctive element of the Islamic tradition, and the practice cannot be understood outside that broader framework. In our admirable rush to avoid hypostatizing Islam, we may miss the present reality that the construct has for those who identify themselves as Muslims.
One anthropologist, while sympathetic in some ways with the arguments of his colleagues that, as a unit of investigation, Islam be replaced with a series of “local Islams,” warns that this approach “overlooks the underlying coherence manifest in the fact that Muslims, however seemingly diverse, all share elements of a common tradition. They characteristically assert their belonging to one umma [community] despite the fluid meanings they may attach to the categories related to it.”18 Those elements are various and diverse; they include, of course, literary texts such as the Qurºan and the prophetic sayings, and practices such as prayer and preaching. The meaning and social significance of these elements are by no means clear and unproblematic: they will vary according to historical context and will frequently erupt with internal conflict. It is not for me, as a Western historian, to use such elements to define Islam; I simply observe that Muslims, in varying ways, commonly use them to define their own tradition. My purpose here, I think, is not that far removed from that of Michael Gilsenan in his excellent study of modern Islam. Gilsenan insisted that his “aim is not to persuade the reader to substitute a relativized and fragmented vision for one of global unity. Rather it is to situate some of these religious, cultural, and ideological forms and practices that people regard 8 Introduction as Islamic in the life and development of their societies.”19 Mutatis mutandis, that is my goal as well.
Nonetheless, our approaches do di¤er somewhat. My topic, of course, is a medieval one, and the nature of the source material has its own imperatives—it may, for example, drive the historian to a slightly higher level of abstraction. But I am also, perhaps, slightly more interested in the explicitly Islamic character of these “religious, cultural, and ideological forms and practices that people regard as Islamic”— in what made them Islamic, and why Muslims contested their Islamic character. The particular “practice” at issue here is preaching. This book makes no claim, however, to be a general study of preaching in the Islamic world. In fact, its pretensions are much more modest. It represents an e¤ort to understand the tradition of popular preaching and storytelling, and the bitter controversy it engendered, in the central Islamic world (principally Egypt and the Fertile Crescent) during what Marshall Hodgson identified as the “Middle Period” (roughly 1000 c.e. to 1500 c.e.).20 The scope of this study, its conceptual as well as geographical and chronological parameters, requires a few words of explanation.
The issues can be conveniently grouped into four categories, the first of which is methodological. In recent years scholars have vigorously debated the question of whether or not “popular culture” forms a distinct and coherent category of analysis. The question has received extensive treatment in the historiography of medieval and early modern Europe, in the work of scholars such as Peter Burke, Jacques LeGo¤, Natalie Zemon Davis, and others.21 Of late, several historians of the medieval Islamic Near East have also turned to a discussion of the issue. Boaz Shoshan, for example, has acknowledged the force of the argument made by the European medievalist Georges Duby and others that it is di‹cult if not impossible to draw precise lines between specific cultural phenomena and clearly delineated socioeconomic groups.22 Indeed, such an argument probably applies with even greater force to the Islamic Near East, in which horizontal divisions between social groups (at least those that belonged to the dominant community of Muslims) arguably were more porous than in, say, the feudal societies of medieval Europe. On the other hand, Shoshan is of the opinion that such conceptual di‹culties do not preclude the existence in the medieval Near East of a cultural stratum that can, in some meaningful sense, be said to reflect the popular. This stratum is embodied in “genres of ‘texts,’ both written and non-written ..., which, despite their unavoidably uncertain boundIntroduction 9 aries, provide safe bases for analysis as primarily popular”—that is, which are the product of those “socially inferior to the bourgeoisie; hence, supposedly also illiterate, at least by and large.”23
The question of literacy is of course a problematic one—in the medieval Near East, for example, literacy (at least for Muslims) almost certainly involved a diverse and sliding scale, rather than one dominated by a sharp distinction between those who could and could not read, since the importance of and ritual emphasis upon the Qurºan placed a premium on a familiarity with the text and its language. But Shoshan’s comments do remind us of the textual complexity of medieval Islamic culture. Much of what Western historians have written about the societies of the medieval Near East has rested upon the deceptively firm foundations of a particular textual tradition—that of chronicles, biographical dictionaries compiled by religious scholars, rarefied works of legal and religious scholarship, the literary legacy of accomplished poets and belletrists. But the story of medieval Islamic culture is more complicated and nuanced than this literary trail would suggest. It is cluttered with a bewildering variety of texts, including stories of saints’ lives, accounts of the splendors of one city or region or another, personalized recountings of dream visions, rhapsodies on the qualities and even the supernatural powers of popular texts. Literary works such as these wreak havoc on the project of cultural archaeology, since they were acknowledged, sometimes even composed, by some representatives of high culture, and so confuse the stratigraphy of the literary remains. But many of them served to undermine, or at least to mute and to make contingent, the authority of that Islam that has been as much a construct of medieval ulama as of modern historians.24 It is this, I take it, to which Shoshan refers in pointing to the popular as an analytically distinct, if not entirely discrete, stratum of Islamic culture. Others have worried about the ideological assumptions behind the very category of “popular culture,” particularly when dealing with matters specifically religious. Ahmet Karamustafa, for example, suggests that we should understand the antinomian and socially deviant behavior of groups such as the Qalandar dervishes as a new mode of piety, one that grew organically out of the values of mainstream Sufism in the Middle Period.
To identify them instead as a manifestation of “popular religion,” he points out, is implicitly to marginalize them and to suggest that they are somehow un-Islamic. Such an attitude is less the reflection of any real and categorical cultural distinctions than it is the product of one line of argument, 10 Introduction associated with both medieval writers such as Ibn Taymiyya and Muslim modernists such as Fazlur Rahman, which has sought to identify one level of Sunni thought and practice as definitively Islamic.25 On the other hand, if we resist the ideological temptation of equating the popular with the timeless, with a cultural stratum that is “immune to historical change” and the domain of illiterate common people clinging “tenaciously to their ancient religious lore and ritual behavior,”26 then what is loosely called popular religion would seem not to be altogether without promise as a field of historical analysis. On the contrary, if we assume that it is the very notion of an “orthodox” Islam, definitive for all times and places, which is problematic—whether that notion is the construct of defensive medieval theologians such as Ibn Taymiyya or an Orientalist tradition informed by the cultural assumptions of European history 27—then it becomes possible to view popular culture and religion as a sphere of exceptional elasticity and fluidity, one that can be understood only in and through its specific manifestations. So we can begin by agreeing with colleagues in European history that the study of religious culture must be “contextual and comparative,” for only in this way can it be seen “in two-way communication with the structures of authority around it.”28
On the other hand, of course, the Islamic setting poses challenges, limitations, and opportunities of its own. For one thing, the sources available for historians of the medieval Near East are focused overwhelmingly on urban societies, and so the rural experience, which has been so rich a field for historians of popular religious culture in late medieval and early modern Europe, has remained more obscure. To date, at least, the historiography of the medieval Islamic world knows no parallel to the peasants of the village of Montaillou in Languedoc famously studied by Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie.29 Even within an urban context, as we noted earlier, it is harder in the Islamic case to identify with precision particular social classes, at least as those classes have been understood in European societies, and so perhaps it is more di‹cult to study popular Islamic religious culture in the precise “relational” manner that European historians have urged.30 Moreover, the practice we will identify in this study as popular preaching and storytelling seems to have cut across and been experienced by most, if not all, Muslim social groups. But in the apparent confusion lies the greatest opportunity for clarifying the specifically Islamic aspects of the problem. For example, the study of popular preaching may shed less light on relations between distinct social classes than it Introduction 11 does on certain ambiguities in Islamic structures of religious authority and the dynamics of power relationships which those ambiguities engendered. And so what will emerge most clearly from this study, I hope, is a more nuanced understanding of the nature of that authority.
A second conceptual problem concerns the terminology employed by medieval commentators to describe the phenomenon of preaching. Ironically, the di‹culty arises from the fact that preaching, or listening to preachers, was so enormously popular. We are not dealing here with a practice such as the continuing celebration in medieval Egypt of the pre-Islamic festival of Nawruz or with self-consciously deviant behavior such as the Qalandars’ ostentatious removal of all bodily hair. Rather, our concern is with a practice that was central to the religious experience of most, if not all, medieval Muslims. Preaching took place on a number of di¤erent levels. On the grandest level there was the sermon (khupba) delivered during the Friday congregational prayers, in a mosque designed for that purpose ( jamiª ), by a preacher (khapib) often, although not always, representing or appointed by the ruler. These sermons, delivered from the pulpit (minbar), which constituted one of the few regular features of congregational mosques, followed fairly rigorous conventions regarding form and content—formulaic praise of God, prayers for MuÇammad and his community, recitation of Qurºanic passages, and short admonitions to pious behavior.31 AÇmad b. ªAli alQalqashandi, author of a famous Mamluk period manual of administrative practice, commented that, of the various religious o‹ces a scholar or jurist might hope to fill, that of saying the khupba was in fact “the grandest and highest in rank” (ajall al-wa}aªif wa-aªlaha), because the Prophet himself had done it.32 A saying of the Prophet urged care in stretching the attention span of listeners: “make your prayers [7alat] long and your sermon [khupba] short.”33
In addition, of course, the Friday sermon had an explicitly political character. At least in the early decades of Islamic history, it was the usual practice for MuÇammad and, later, the caliph or his governor to deliver the khupba himself, and, although this practice had largely lapsed by the Middle Period, Muslims such as al-Qalqashandi retained its memory as an ideal.34 Even after rulers generally abandoned the practice of delivering the khupba, the occasion retained its political importance, for the Friday sermon customarily included mention of the name of the ruler as a token of his legitimacy; failure to mention his name could amount to an act of rebellion.35The political function of the khupba as a public acknowl12 Introduction edgment of a ruler’s authority was one of the standard features of medieval Islamic polities of all stripes. On the first Friday after the conquest of Egypt by the armies of the Ismaªili Fapimid caliph, led by their general, Jawhar, the preacher in the mosque of ªAmr in al-Fuspap recited the khupba in the name of the Fapimid caliph al-Muªizz, marking the arrival of the new dynasty.36 Similarly, when the urban leaders of the eastern Iranian city of Nishapur turned the town over to the Saljuq Turks, the bulk of Nishapur’s inhabitants learned of the event only several days later, when the khapib said the Friday prayers in the name of the Saljuq sultan Toghrïl Beg.37
The khupba became one of the most characteristic and universal features of Islamic religious ritual. Preachers at the large congregational mosques in the major cities—such as the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, that of al-Man7ur in Baghdad, or that of ªAmr b. al-ªA7 in al-Fuspap—were usually appointed by the ruler, and might attract thousands of worshipers to their audience on Fridays and major feast days. But a short address at noon on Friday did not preclude the possibility of preaching in other venues. Taj al-Din al-Subki, in his eighth/fourteenth-century survey of the responsibilities of the holders of various religious and secular o‹ces, identified four di¤erent types of preachers: in addition to the khapib, the waªi} (preacher, pl. wuªªa}, from a verb meaning “to admonish, warn”), the qa77 (storyteller, pl. qu77a7), and the qariº al-kursi (literally, “one who reads from a chair”). All in all, the distinctions al-Subki draws have a formulaic, even artificial, air about them. With the exception of the political aspects of the khapib’s sermons, to which he alludes, and perhaps their formal and precisely delineated venue, there is little to distinguish the four. The waªi}, al-Subki wrote, had the responsibility of inspiring pious fear in his listeners and telling them stories of the early heroes of the Islamic faith (al-salaf al-7aliÇin).
The qa77 would sit or stand in the streets, reciting from memory passages from the Qurºan, hadiths, and stories of the early Muslims and encouraging his audience to pray, fast, and fulfill their other cultic and legal obligations. He must be careful not to recite what an unsophisticated public (al-ªamma, “the common people”) might not understand, such as hadiths about the “attributes,” 7ifat, of God (presumably because of the danger of anthropomorphism) or passages from di‹cult theological or legal works. On the other hand, a similar injunction applied to the khapib, who should avoid discussions that would be di‹cult for an ordinary listener (ghayr al-kha77a) to comprehend and limit himself to treating “clear” (wa)iÇ) matters. The qariº al-kurs i’s responsibilities were simIntroduction 13 ilar: he was to recite traditions, simple Qurºanic commentary, and the like to the common people, although his name derived from the fact that, unlike the qa77, he would sit in mosques, schools (madrasas), and Sufi convents (khanqahs) and read directly from books.38 What exactly do these various designations mean? Was there always a meaningful hierarchy of o‹ces and functions, with a distinct group of people operating in an organized fashion to exhort and transmit basic religious knowledge to the common people? Here we must tread carefully. It seems that the o‹ce of khapib customarily represented a specific post and function: that of delivering the sermon at noon on Fridays to the assembled congregation of Muslims.
Throughout the medieval period, and down to the present day, individuals have been hired to discharge this duty in the congregational mosques of Muslim cities. The delivery of the khupba represented a coherent if limited tradition of religious discourse, and prominent medieval preachers such as Ibn Nubata al-Fariqi (d. 374/984–85) published collections of sermons which served as models for those who came after them.39 Beyond this, however, the situation becomes much harder to pin down. Ibn al-Jawzi, a prominent preacher and critic of the preaching tradition, observed that, while terms such as qa77, waªi}, and mudhakkir (one who reminds his audience “of the blessing God has bestowed on them”) originally had distinct meanings, in his day those meanings tended to blur, and the distinctions between them broke down.40 Ibn al-Jawzi suggested that the term qa77 in particular had come to embrace all three, although in fact qa77 and waªi} are both fairly common in the medieval sources and are generally used there (and so will be here) more or less interchangeably. The social historian must use terms such as qa77 and waªi}, in part because the sources do and in part because social history is inevitably concerned with the individuals who play certain social roles. Nonetheless, doing so is in a way misleading, because the qu77a7 and wuªªa} did not necessarily form a discrete social or occupational category. We must be careful not to reify terms that, for the medieval Muslims who used them, had more flexible, functional, contingent, and overlapping meanings. Terms such as qa77 and waªi} should not be thought of as identifying categorical types but, rather, activities or even di¤erent aspects of the same activity, storytelling and preaching having both grown out of a common cultural soil.
In this case the activity was the task of transmitting basic religious knowledge to, instilling piety in, and encouraging pious behavior among the common people, by which I mean that large body of Muslims who by nature, tem14 Introduction perament, or profession were not clearly members of the ulama, the class of religious scholars and those training to be such. The common people might, of course, form a part or even the greater part of the audience for Friday prayers and the accompanying sermon, but such occasions by no means exhausted either their need for religious instruction or their curiosity for religious knowledge. A third area of confusion arises from a common phenomenon in the societies and cultures of the medieval Islamic world, namely, the blurring of the boundaries between what appear to be, at first glance, discrete activities. In the first place, of course, storytelling was a disparate phenomenon, and the Islamic societies of the Near East inherited and adopted a long-standing tradition of storytelling of a purely secular nature. This literature took a variety of di¤erent forms: it was recited and recorded in both prose and verse, and it has survived as both epic narratives and more variegated collections of anecdotes. Edward Lane, in his classic, if dated, ethnographical study of Egyptian society in the early nineteenth century, drew attention to the important social role played by reciters of popular tales such as the fictional account of the life of the Sultan al-]ahir Baybars.41
There is a certain degree of overlap between such genres of entertainment, on the one hand, and the recitation of tales for didactic purposes and as a form of exhortation, on the other. This was a problem that bedeviled certain areas of religious discourse, especially that of hadiths, from an early period. By the third Islamic century a tradition circulated which clearly responded to the need some felt to distinguish between edification and entertainment: “Woe to him who spreads false hadiths to entertain the people.”42 But the confusion was endemic and could lend an air of religious gravity and significance even to tales apparently designed specifically for amusement. For example, some redactions of the Sirat ªAntar, an epic narrative concerning a famous pre-Islamic poet and warrior, begin with an account of the prophet Ibrahim drawn from the qi7a7 al-anbiyaº. 43 Second, and more important, any e¤ort to separate popular preaching and religious storytelling from the organized transmission of religious knowledge places strains upon the conceptual categories with which we seek to understand medieval Islamic culture. The centrality of knowledge and learning in medieval Islamic societies and the social uses to which religious knowledge and its transmission were put have given rise to a more extensive secondary literature than any other topic of medieval Islamic hisIntroduction 15 tory.44 One of the salient arguments of a recent study of higher education in late medieval Cairo was that people from various walks of life, including many who would not normally be thought of as members of the academic elite (the ulama), participated in some limited but meaningful way in the organized transmission of religious knowledge and texts.45With popular preaching and storytelling we encounter, as it were, the flip side of that coin.
The texts transmitted by preachers and storytellers overlapped with those studied in classes in madrasas, mosques, and elsewhere. What little we can know about the texts and topics addressed in popular preaching circles will be discussed more fully (chap. 2); for now it is enough to observe that they might include Prophetic traditions, texts such as Abu *amid al-Ghazali’s catholic religious treatise IÇyaº ªulum al-din,46 and, of course, stories of the pre-Islamic prophets, which formed an important element in the edifice of Qurºanic commentary, which itself constituted one of the major foci of a religious education. Formal criteria, too, can prove illusive as a means of distinguishing preaching and storytelling from education: classes and storytelling circles were both described by the word sitting (majlis) or circle (Çalqa), and, unless the sources describe precisely the character of a sitting, it can be di‹cult to distinguish one type from the other. The fourth and final problem concerns the sources used to reconstruct the activities of popular preaching and storytelling circles. The societies of the medieval Islamic Near East are in many respects well documented, but not all social activities or cultural phenomena can be reconstituted with ease from the sources at our disposal. Popular preaching and storytelling are particularly problematic in this regard. For instance, references to individual storytellers in the sources, especially the biographical dictionaries that are usually so rich a source for medieval social history, are understandably thin and scattered. As a result, it has been necessary to look for data in a wide variety of source material—for example, chronicles and biographical literature from sixth/twelfth-century Baghdad as well as ninth/fifteenth-century Cairo—simply in order to collect a su‹ciently large body of evidence. This poses a certain danger, of course—namely, that of seeming to remove historical data too far from the contexts that produced it. But several factors make the e¤ort worth the risk.
The first, a negative one, is the thinness of the data from any particular time and place. A second is the structural similarities that characterized the explicitly Sunni, and frequently Turkish, military regimes that dominated the 16 Introduction central Islamic world in this period, as well as the personal connections and shared outlook that bound together the Sunni ulama of the region. A third, perhaps the most important, concerns the subject of popular preaching and storytelling directly. Popular preaching came under sustained and coordinated attack from prominent figures within the legal and religious establishment in precisely this late medieval time frame. The best known of these critiques is that of the Iraqi scholar Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597/1200), in particular his treatise Kitab al-qu77a7 waºl-mudhakkirin, but it was not alone; it directly influenced critical appraisals by Ibn al-*ajj (d. 737/1336), Zayn al-Din al-ªIraqi (d. 806/1404), Jalal al-Din al-Suyup i (d. 911/1505), all residents of Egypt, as well as ªAli b. Maymun al-Idrisi (d. 917/1511), a Moroccan Sufi living in Syria. In a sense this tradition of criticism frames the present study, since it provided the context for a vigorous defense of popular preaching and storytelling which emerged from Egyptian Sufi circles at the end of the eighth/fourteenth or beginning of the ninth/fifteenth century (this text is introduced at the end of chap. 1). More generally, the criticism of popular preachers and religious storytellers formed one element of a broader attack on innovation in religious ritual and practice, which itself constituted one part of an e¤ort by Sunni Muslim scholars to define the Islamic tradition more precisely, a project that was characteristic of the later Middle Period.47 (I shall return to the question of the specifically medieval context of my topic at the end of the book.) Moving beyond biographical and historical sources, and the polemical literature directed against popular preaching and other suspect religious practices, are there other texts that allow us to contact the phenomenon more directly?
Those medieval sermons that have survived and have been published were produced largely by reputable, well-educated, and wellconnected scholars, such as Ibn al-Jawzi. 48 Many bear the marks of being at least semio‹cial. For example, the sermons of Ibn Nubata, which have been reprinted many times, are very short, in ornate rhyming prose, and have a pronounced political element. Ibn Nubata was khapib at the court of the *amdanid ruler Sayf al-Dawla in Mayyafariqin and Aleppo, on the Byzantine frontier, and was known especially as a preacher of jihad,exhorting his listeners to holy war against the infidels across the border.49 Preachers such as Ibn al-Jawzi were well known and held in high esteem, but the extent to which their sermons had an impact on those delivered by less famous and less well-trained practitioners is impossible to judge. Nonetheless, su‹cient sources do survive to permit at least a tentative Introduction 17 study of the phenomenon of popular storytelling and preaching. There are, of course, collections of the tales that were popular in storytelling circles, the qi7a7 al-anbiyaº, collections compiled by individuals such as alThaªlabi, al-Kisaºi, Ibn Kathir, and others.50 Works such as these form a sort of literary pool from which preachers might draw, but in themselves are several degrees removed from spontaneous interaction with an audience. We may approach storytelling and preaching circles more directly in a collection of hadiths frequently transmitted by the qu77a7, compiled by Ibn Taymiyya, one of the leading Muslim polemicists of the Middle Period, and recently published under the title AÇadith al-qu77a7. 51
There is no reason to believe that his list is comprehensive, but it does represent a sort of “snapshot” of the material that an individual might encounter in a storytelling or preaching circle and so may help us to define the parameters of the religious knowledge generally available to nonelite, nonscholarly Muslims. Direct records of the sort of preaching and storytelling circles that form the subject of this study are, of course, relatively rare, as the occasions were almost by definition fleeting. Nonetheless, some do survive and can help to fill in the skeletal picture derived from Ibn Taymiyya’s AÇadith al-qu77a7 and the polemical tradition. Among the more interesting is one associated with the preacher ªAbd Allah b. Saªd Allah, known as Shaykh Shuªayb (or ªUbayd) al-*urayfish (or al-Harfush) (d. 801/1398–99), an Egyptian Sufi preacher connected to the shadowy underground brotherhood of the *arafish, who spent a number of years living and preaching in Mecca.52 The people had “great faith” (iªtiqad zaºid ) in him, according to the historian and jurist Ibn *ajar al-ªAsqalani, and he left to posterity a popular collection of short sermons and pious tales which has been reprinted several times in the modern period, a collection that goes by the title of alRaw) al-faºiq fiºl-mawaªi} waºl-raqaºiq (The Splendid Garden of Sermons and Edifying Tales).53 A more problematic document is an anonymous and incomplete manuscript housed in the British Library (Or. 7528).
The manuscript is a random collection of tales, homilies, and brief excursuses on a variety of religious and legal topics. Since the manuscript is missing its first and last folios, it is impossible to say where it was from or when it was composed or even whether it was intended to constitute a single, integral literary work but what it seems to represent is a summary catalogue of what one individual heard—or transmitted—at a popular preaching or storytelling circle at some point in the later Middle Period.54 One must 18 Introduction be careful, of course, about drawing generalizations from a document of such uncertain provenance; on the other hand, B.L. Or. 7528 provides a level of detail and a sense of spontaneous contact missing from more formal, literary sources, whether those sources were hostile, like Ibn Taymiyya’s, or sympathetic, like al-*urayfish’s. With these methodological, terminological, and source problems in mind, we face a question: is it possible to analyze popular preaching and the transmission of religiously edifying tales as a distinct, if not discrete, aspect of medieval Islamic culture? Johannes Pedersen, an early Western student of Islamic preaching, argued that by the later Middle Period the storytellers had lost importance and that their functions had been absorbed by the khapibs and the Sufis.
As proof, he cited the fact that al-Qalqashandi, in his enormous compendium of information for government scribes, did “not mention the qa77 or the waªiz among the divine o‹ces in Cairo, Damascus and *aleb [Aleppo].”55 But al-Qalqashandi’s omission reflects only the fact that such individuals did not occupy, or only rarely occupied, formal posts in religious and educational institutions. Storytelling and exhortation in fact remained central to the spiritual life of Muslims in the Middle Period, even if the individuals who practiced it, and the forums and even the forms in which they did so, cannot always be identified with precision and clarity. The authors who compiled the enormous biographical dictionaries that are perhaps the most important source for social historians of the medieval Near East in general concerned themselves with individuals (scholars, jurists, sultans, and soldiers) of a more exalted rank than those who routinely preached and told stories to the common people. Nonetheless, these biographical dictionaries are littered with stray references to qu77a7 and wuªªa} who caught their attention for one reason or another. As a rule, these references are unfortunately (but not surprisingly) brief, but they are common enough to indicate that the tradition of popular preaching and storytelling persisted.
Looking ahead, we might say that the tradition of popular preaching in the Islamic Middle Period was defined by three characteristics. In the first place, stories—in particular those of the pre-Islamic prophets, the qi7a7 al-anbiyaº, and of the pious early Muslims—formed the stock-in-trade of many popular preachers. Such stories were by no means restricted to the popular preachers, nor did they exhaust the latter’s repertoire, but they did prove immensely popular with the audiences the preachers addressed, and so provided a helpful vehicle for the transmission of Islamic values Introduction 19 and religious knowledge supportive of them. Second, and more important, the relationship of the tradition of popular preaching and storytelling to the more refined and disciplined transmission of religious knowledge was tentative and problematic but nonetheless real and unavoidable. The tension between them manifested itself on a variety of levels: that of topic (i.e., the nature and subject of the material addressed); that of authority (i.e., the means and criteria by which the legitimacy of the information transmitted was established); and that of personnel (i.e., the identity and training of those engaged in the transmission of religious knowledge).
On all three levels the tradition of popular preaching and storytelling found itself in conflict with the disciplined transmission of religious knowledge and texts (what we might label, in the most tentative terms, “higher education”);56 at the same time, however, the two sociocultural processes could never be completely and hermetically isolated from each other. Third, the tradition of popular preaching and storytelling became, over the medieval period, increasingly intertwined with Sufism—on that point, at least, Pedersen was correct. The surest proof of the persistence of a distinct tradition of popular preaching and storytelling is that it generated a considerable degree of criticism, which, as we have seen, formed a discernible theme of medieval religious polemic and which, along with the response to it, will form a principal focus of this study. That criticism, and the broader medieval polemic over blameworthy innovations and corrupt religious practices, implied a hierarchical relationship between that which was in some sense legitimately Islamic and that which fell short of recognized Islamic ideals. Since that polemic was produced by the scholarly elite, religious practices popular with the common people almost inevitably fell on the short end of the stick.
This points to a final observation that the reader should bear in mind. Islam, like any great religion or civilization, is too complex to be perfectly consistent; rather, it is fraught with competing and sometimes contradictory impulses and values. It is those very contradictions that generate the tensions that give the Islamic tradition vitality. On the one hand, it is frequently observed that Islam, which quite self-consciously possesses no sacerdotal class, realizes the Protestant ideal of a “priesthood of all believers” more perfectly than most Protestant sects. All Muslims, the Qurºan makes clear in a famous passage, in the end stand before God as equals, distinguished only by the depth of their devotion to their Lord: “O you who 20 Introduction believe, do not let one group mock another who may be better than they, nor one group of women another, who may be better than they....O mankind, we have created you male and female, and made you into peoples and tribes, so that you may know one another. Truly, the noblest among you in the sight of God is the most pious. And God is All-knowing, Allaware.”57
Even the distinction between male and female is, in a sense, incidental: “Men and women who have surrendered [to God], believing men and believing women, obedient men and obedient women, truthful men and truthful women, patient men and patient women, humble men and humble women, men who are charitable and women who are charitable, men who fast and women who fast, men who are chaste and women who are chaste, men who remember God often and women who do so—for them God has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.”58 On the other hand, medieval Islamic societies were arranged around a series of hierarchies. In legal terms, for example, those societies drew sharp distinctions between those who were, say, Muslim or non-Muslim, free or enslaved, male or female. In the religious sphere, hierarchies tended to form around the question of knowledge.
The replication of religious knowledge, for example, through study, teaching, and the transmission of recognized texts, depended upon a system that, for all its flexibility and tendency to draw in and include as participants Muslims from quite di¤erent walks of life, spelled out clearly the grounds on which one transmitter of religious knowledge was to be preferred to another. Not surprisingly, therefore, the polemic over preachers and storytellers was ultimately a question of knowledge. The qu77a7 and wuªªa} served the role of transmitting basic religious knowledge and instruction to the common people; the controversy that their activities engendered was in the final analysis about how the common people were to understand Islam.
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