Download PDF | (Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art) Stephennie Mulder - The Shrines of the 'Alids in Medieval Syria_ Sunnis, Shi'is and the Architecture of Coexistence-Edinburgh University Press (2014).
313 Pages
INTRODUCTION
‘A Road for All Muslims’
It was Damascus, around the year ad 1238, and a bitter controversy had erupted between Sunnis and Shiis over the shrine of a saintly fi gure – a certain Malika, said to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad – located at the gate of Bab Jayrun. Apparently, like many holy places in this period, the shrine had been ‘rediscovered’ by someone who had a vision in which he learned this was the long-lost site of her grave.1 In an outpouring of devotion, the Shii inhabitants of the city began enthusiastically to build a shrine to commemorate the holy fi gure. The shrine quickly outgrew the narrow space afforded by the passageway of the gate. Nevertheless, a decision was made to block the gate and continue with construction. Not everyone was so enamoured of the plan, though. The contemporary Sunni historian Abu Shama (d. 1268), for example, was furious:
(This gate was) a road, which was already too narrow for its traveller! (Now,) the narrowness and tightness has been multiplied on those who come and go. May God multiply (instead) the punishment of (the Shiis) and enumerate the recompense of those who aid in (the shrine’s) destruction and the removal of this hazard, following the Sunna of the Prophet in destroying the Masjid al-Dirar, erected by the infi dels for his enemies!2 This was indeed a harsh chastisement.3
The Masjid al-Dirar was a pseudo-mosque built by the Prophet’s enemies to deceive the early Muslims. The Prophet had ordered its destruction personally.4 To compare the shrine at the Bab Jayrun with the Masjid al-Dirar was to utterly deny its legitimacy and to equate the actions of the Shiis with those of the enemies of Islam. But despite such protestations, the shrine persisted in one form or another for several centuries, and even the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Qaytbay’s (r. 1468–96) direct intervention could not deter attempts to eliminate it. Attempting to resolve the dispute, which was apparently still ongoing by the mid-sixteenth century, the Sunni historian Muhammad Ibn Tulun (d. 1546) did not mince words:
The Shiis (al-†åifa al-råfi∂a) and those ignoramuses who follow them, may God punish them many times over, allege it (is her burial place). That is one of the greatest lies. It is a road, for (all) Muslims! Nobody who possesses even a tiny bit of intelligence and faith doubts it. I replied . . . so that the truth may be known about that and so the words of every misguided and damned person (who comes along) is not adhered to . . .5 And yet, despite Ibn Tulun’s outrage, the shrine, with its apparently specious origins, continued to be venerated for some time thereafter. That it was suggests that it was not only the city’s small Shii minority who supported its perpetuation, for Damascus was, and remains, a strongly Sunni city.
This study explores the unspoken subtext woven deeply within the supporting structure of the preceding story. Namely, it argues that throughout Islamic history, but particularly in the period between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries in Syria, the shrines of the Alids – the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through his cousin and son-in-law Ali – repeatedly became objects of patronage by both Sunni and Shii elites, and that this process created a newly unifying, and distinctly Islamic, sacred landscape. In each case, shrines that have been perceived or assumed to be primarily ‘Shii’ spaces turn out to have been founded, or later reconfi gured, by Sunni elite fi gures to be shared, pan-Islamic and inclusive. To that end, what is striking about the story of the shrine at Bab Jayrun is not the expectedness of such disputes among Sunnis and Shiis, but rather that it is a notably unusual story: in fact, it is a rare example of open controversy between Sunnis and Shiis regarding the burial place of a member of the ahl al-bayt, or Family of the Prophet.
Although sectarian controversies around the shrines did occur – and some are hinted at by various indications of scepticism given by the medieval authors who list the shrines – the most salient attribute of the medieval Islamic cult of saints is not its controversial nature, but its remarkably ecumenical one. Furthermore, expressions of scepticism recorded by some medieval authors are probably refl ective more of differences between the learned classes (ulamå), who form the majority of the authors of our textual sources (and who would have been far more cautious in according authenticity to sites) – and ordinary people, who generally lacked the ability to verify their authenticity or were uninterested in doing so. Only infrequently do such controversies take on a sectarian character. And when they do, it is often tied to some other issue and only subsequently cast in sectarian terms: as was the case with the shrine at Bab Jayrun, which, like many other shrines that arose in this period, may perhaps have escaped controversy altogether had it not blocked a vital route through the city.6 Indeed, expressions of caution about the authenticity of some locales in our sources are probably to be read as evidence of how beloved and heavily visited such sites were in actual practice, for if they were not, there would be no need for the learned to caution against their ‘erroneous’ visitation.
In large part, shared reverence for the shrines of the Alids seems to have been a point of commonality between medieval Muslims that has few parallels elsewhere in Islamic social and sectarian history. This non-sectarian veneration of the Alids was present from at least the ninth century,7 but it became a major phenomenon at a time of great religious excitement in the Islamic lands: a period spanning the eleventh to thirteenth centuries ad and encompassing the dynasties of the Seljuks, Zangids, Ayyubids and Mamluks in Syria. ‘Syria’ is here conceived as the Islamic geographers conceived it: referred to by them as ‘Bilad al-Sham’, it included roughly the area from the Euphrates in the north and east to the Mediterranean in the west and the deserts that today mark the border with Jordan (or Saudi Arabia) in the south: the geographical area that is sometimes called the Levant. Thus, medieval al-Sham was a contiguous geographical entity that included the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel.
For the sake of clarity and because the term is more wellknown, this book uses ‘Syria’ instead of al-Sham, however the term is used with the caveat that it is the greater geographic designation that is meant. Shrine visitation in this era was widely practised across all elements of medieval Islamic society, and the frequent performance of devotional activities was central to pious, religious and social interaction in the medieval Islamic lands.8 Despite some sanctions against shrine visitation in the Mamluk era (which nevertheless appear to have been widely disregarded), there is no evidence that this was an issue of real concern in Seljuk and Ayyubid times.9 Furthermore, this religious climate was one in which several streams of official and popular religious revivalism, reactionism and renewal converged: the Crusades motivated claims for the resacralisation of the land for Islam,10 a movement for the revival of Sunnism (i˙yå al-sunna) begun under the Seljuks provoked an awareness of sectarian issues and a popular atmosphere of religious excitement that was the defi ning characteristic of the period, and the political claims of new, unstable and competing regimes in need of social and political legitimisation facilitated a commitment to pious architectural construction on the official level in Syria that was often elicited, mirrored and/or imitated by ordinary citizens.
This was an era of great religious effervescence, in which hundreds of new religious buildings of all stripes were founded and endowed, and in which it was perfectly ordinary for large crowds to stay the night in mosques in anticipation of seeing a particularly beloved preacher.11 On the popular level, this excitement played a crucial role in the generation of a new landscape of sacred sites throughout Syria, for in these three centuries hundreds of new shrines were rediscovered, constructed and venerated. The broader geographic designation discussed above is important because it is precisely in this period, against the backdrop of these social and political events, that Syria’s holiness was consciously and systematically inscribed upon the land, and that the boundaries of that landscape were defi ned. Along with the patronage of hundreds of new mosques, madrasas and khanqas (Sufi lodges) by the elite, the main engine for the generation of this landscape was the rediscovery and resanctifi cation of sites of pilgrimage, in large part by ordinary people, and devoted to a truly astonishing number of holy fi gures. And accompanying their rediscovery was the invention or expansion of a literature to describe, categorise, hierarchise and commemorate the holy sites.
That literature consisted of local chronicles, biographical dictionaries, historical topographies, pilgrimage guides and fa∂åil treatises (works on the merits of a locality), among others. Syria, land of the ancient monotheistic prophets, home of the sacred city of Jerusalem, had always been considered by Muslims to be a ‘holy land’ but, as recent research by Zayde Antrim has shown, this defi nition was not fi xed, and it evolved over time and in response to the changing political mandate of the various ruling powers. According to Antrim, in the 6th/12th and 7th/13th centuries representations of the cities of Jerusalem and Damascus, and later Aleppo, proliferated. These city-centric representations gradually gave way to representations of Syria as a coherent region by the late 7th/13th century. In the fi rst half of the 8th/14th century, however, representations of the Mamluk Empire as a revived Dar al-Islam, or ‘Abode of Islam’, within which the region of Syria was subsumed, began to dominate the discourse of place . . .
These shifts in discourse paralleled the political history of the period.12 Thus, in the Zangid period, representations were city-centric; in the Nurid and Ayyubid period, they became somewhat broader for all Syria; and in the Mamluk period they included Syria, Egypt and the Jazira (Mesopotamia). Antrim’s analysis focuses largely on the impetus for political legitimisation provided by this body of literature, but she also notes there were other factors that may have led ordinary people, as well, to throw themselves, their wealth and sometimes the work of their own hands into the building and establishment of this landscape. One of these, as noted above and examined in Chapter 5, may have been a newly urgent sense of the land as holy, brought about by the incursion of Crusader forces at the end of the eleventh century, which perhaps fuelled a desire to ‘claim the land for Islam’ – or perhaps simply generated a heightened awareness of, and sensitivity to, the holiness of the local geography.13 Furthermore, the Crusades spelled the downfall of many formerly revered sites, as it was common practice to pillage the holy places of the Muslims and vice versa during the siege of a city, as happened, for example, to the shrines of al-Husayn and al-Muhassin in Aleppo.14
Thus, the destruction of many shrines during this period led logically to their re-establishment and renewal, and this, too, may have generated an atmosphere of heightened devotion to such locales. In addition to spurring renovations, such acts of desecration may perhaps also have served as inspiration for the generation of new shrines. Similarly, as noted previously, the movement for the revivifi cation of Sunnism, and also the growth and spread of Sufi sm, probably also contributed to a frame of mind in which the rediscovery of sites of pilgrimage was considered an appropriate and praiseworthy activity. It is not the ambition of the present work to carefully catalogue the creation and establishment of the whole of this landscape with its many diverse shrines and holy places, for a series of studies over the past few decades have begun to tackle this project admirably.15 Instead, the contribution I hope to make is twofold: fi rst, to delineate the medieval history and architectural evolution of one subset of the buildings within that landscape: the shrines of the Alids in Syria.
These shrines, with their distinctly Islamic character and their broad appeal to Muslims across sectarian divisions, were some of the most intensively patronised and visited of all the sites employed in the generation of that medieval landscape. Nevertheless, it is only recently that the shrines of the Alids have begun to attract scholarly attention, and many aspects of their histories, foundation and evolution are, as yet, unknown. Most sites have not received even the most basic study of their architectural and patronage histories. Thus, on the simplest level, there is a need for a comprehensive reconstruction of the medieval textual, architectural and archaeological histories of these shrines, and this has been an important goal of the research here. An important secondary theme developed here is the question of how the patronage and survival of these shrines from the Seljuk to the Mamluk eras subverts, nuances and enriches many of the assumptions surrounding a dominant paradigm in Islamic historiography: that of the Sunni Revival.
The Sunni Revival, a concept derived from the Arabic i˙yå al-sunna (meaning ‘revivifi cation of the Sunna [tradition] of the Prophet Muhammad’), is a term often used to characterise the era from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, during which the Seljuk sultans and their ideological successors in Syria and Egypt, the Zangid and Ayyubids, actively sought to eliminate the Shii dynasty of the Fatimids, who had ruled the Maghreb, Egypt, Syria and the Hijaz (the region including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Arabia) from the tenth to the late twelfth centuries. The Revival was also directed against the suzerainty of Twelver Shii Buyid amirs over the Sunni Abbasid caliph in Baghdad between the early tenth and the mid-eleventh centuries, and the perceived threat of more heterodox Shii groups such as the Zaydis and the Nusayris (collectively known in the sources as the ghulå†), who had grown in real or alleged strength in this period.16 Indeed, the perceived infl uence of Shiism was so strong during the tenth century that it has famously been called the ‘Shii century’, for in those days, it seemed as though the Islamic world might well tilt towards adoption of this now-minority sect.17
This did not happen, in part because of an ideological countertrend that prevailed after the Sunni Seljuk viziers overthrew the Shii dynasty of the Buyid amirs in 1055 and installed themselves as temporal rulers of the Islamic lands, under the spiritual sovereignty of the Abbasid caliph. The Seljuks styled themselves overtly as the restorers of Sunnism, and as they extended political control over formerly Shii lands, they and their successors the Zangids and Ayyubids also propagated ihyå al-sunna, the reinvigoration of Sunnism. To this end, the Seljuks and their successors actively sponsored a renaissance in Sunni theology and jurisprudence that was disseminated and reinforced via their support and patronage of various Sunni institutions, in particular madrasas, or schools for the teaching of Islamic law and theology.
The Revival’s sweetest moment of political victory was reserved for the Ayyubid Sultan Saladin, who overthrew the last Shii Fatimid caliph in 1171. Some scholars have argued that for the arts, the implications of this movement may have been far-reaching: one recent work maintains that the Revival was ‘the primary motivating force behind many of the cultural and artistic changes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries’.18 On the other hand, shrines, and commemorative architecture generally, have their own place in the historiography of Islamic lands. Indeed, much of the debate surrounding their initial appearance and, later, their proliferation in the medieval period has been tied to the assumption that in its earliest years Sunni Islam abjured the pre-Islamic practice of raising tombs over the graves of the dead, preferring a simple burial and the taswiyat al-qubËr, or ‘levelling of the graves’ to the ground.19
Later, scholars have argued, it was only with the appearance of Shii devotional practice, which in the eleventh century began to be sponsored, supported and propagated by the Shii dynasty of the Fatimids, that shrine building and visitation re-emerged as a normative Islamic practice. According to this argument, the veneration of the dead was always suspect in Sunni circles, generally frowned upon by Islamic theologians and practised largely by those on the periphery of mainstream, ‘orthodox’ Sunnism, those perhaps denied access to the traditional means of religious participation: women, for example, or religious minorities such as the Shiis. This research arose out of my initial puzzlement that the shrines of the Alids did not seem to conform to any of these historiographical paradigms. First of all, it quickly became apparent that these ‘Shii’ shrines had been built, maintained and perpetuated in large part by elite Sunnis.
In fact, after carrying out a survey of some forty shrines following the itinerary of the medieval pilgrimage guide author Ali al-Harawi through Syria, Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon, it was clear that nearly all of them had, at some point in their evolution, benefi ted from the patronage of Sunnis, and some were entirely the result of Sunni intervention. Furthermore, as noted above, the peak of this fl urry of shrine rediscovery, renewal and perpetuation occurred precisely in the period that was ostensibly most antagonistic to Shii practice: the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, under the Seljuks and Ayyubids.
Thus, they were clearly venerated, visited and sometimes patronised by both Shiis and Sunnis throughout their history, and it could hardly be said that they were exclusively ‘Shii’ spaces in any unambiguous, clearly defi nable way. The ‘Shii-centric’ theory of the development of shrine veneration has been challenged recently by several scholars, who have argued that reverence for the graves of holy fi gures was a feature of the earliest Islamic practitioners – both Sunni and Shii – and that until the Mamluk period (in the thirteenth century), there was no real objection to the practice, to which a wide swath of Muslims was devoted across time, geography, and social and sectarian barriers. Moreover the practice remained an integral, even an essential, part of Islamic piety even after some challenges to it were raised in the thirteenth century.20 And yet, despite the apparently widespread practice of Sunni shrine veneration, there were clear differences between how Sunnis and Shiis approached devotional action and the emphasis it received in ritual and pious practice. For Shiis, the centrality of devotion to the Family of the Prophet meant that the shrines of the Alids, and visitation of other holy sites, played an especially meaningful role within Shii devotional life, and within Shii piety more broadly.
Thus, the patronage and propagation of the Alid shrines had a far greater infl uence on the development of Shii ritual and practice than it had on similar practices within Sunnism. While Sunnis revere sites devoted to the Prophet’s family, and their visitation has traditionally been considered a meritorious activity, such visitation was only one aspect of a wide range of pious activities prescribed by Sunni piety. In contrast, for the Shiis, the performance of acts of visitation (ziyåråt) to the holy Family of the Prophet, and activities carried out in their vicinity such as repentance, requests for intervention (shafåa) or the renewal of vows to the Shii Imams – all of whom are descendants of the Prophet – have an absolutely central role in religious and theological experience, without which much other spiritual activity is rendered hollow. This is because the Prophet’s family played an essential role in the creation of the Shii sense of self, dependent in large part on the generation over many centuries of a narrative of persecution and suffering under unjust rulers, a narrative initiated at the Battle of Karbala in Muharram 680, when hopes for the rightful succession to the Caliphate were dashed with the brutal murder and decapitation of Ali’s son al-Husayn by the Sunni Umayyad caliph.
Ever after, reverence for the descendants of the Prophet and a desire for empathetic remembrance of their tragic fate have formed a fundamental aspect of Shii identity and religious practice. Thus, while it could be said that both Sunnis and Shiis revere the ahl al-bayt, it cannot not also be said that reverence for the Prophet’s family played an equal role in the religious ritual, history or self-imagination of the two sects. A central concern, then, is how might we characterise these shrines as distinct architectural spaces created out of this complex, polyvalent and sometimes confl icting web of religious associations and piety? Here, I propose that in medieval Syria, Alid devotional space was often reframed and experienced as shared, pan-Islamic and inclusive. At times this reconfi guration occurred for reasons of personal devotion or piety; at other times it was part of a political bid to gain infl uence over Shii communities or part of a larger social policy of reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiis. These acts took place within an environment of intensive sanctifi cation and renewal of the Islamic holy landscape, a trend that peaked between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.
This environment fostered the discovery of new shrines; a revived interest in shrine construction; and a newly ecumenical approach to the commemoration of holy fi gures, Sunni and Shii alike. In the end, this Sunni investment in Alid places of pilgrimage created a new type of polyvalent devotional space: space that meant multiple things to varied groups of devotees; space that served as nodes of interaction between factions often depicted in opposing terms. Thus, behind the political rhetoric of Sunni ascendancy, a complex and fl uid interconfessional negotiation often took place. The history of these shrines allows for a more nuanced interpretation of the relationship between Sunnis and Shiis in the medieval period, and furthermore, the mapping of such sites reveals how material and devotional culture may often illuminate the disjuncture between official rhetoric and religious or social praxis.
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