Download PDF | Jonathan E. Brockopp - Muhammad’s Heirs_ The Rise of Muslim Scholarly Communities, 622-950-Cambridge University Press (2017).
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Muhammad’s Heirs
Muslim scholars are a vital part of Islam and are sometimes considered “heirs to the prophets,” continuing Muhammad’s work of establishing Islam in the centuries after his death. But this was not always the case: indeed, Muslims survived the turmoil of their first century largely without the help of scholars. In this book, Jonathan Brockopp seeks to determine the nature of Muslim scholarly communities and to account for their emergence from the very beginning of the Muslim story until the mid-tenth century.
By analyzing coins, papyri, and Arabic literary manuscripts from the ancient mosque-library of Kairouan, Tunisia, Brockopp offers a new interpretation of Muslim scholars’ rise to positions of power and influence, serving as moral guides and the chief arbiters of Muslim tradition. This book will be of great benefit to scholars of comparative religion and advanced students in Middle Eastern history, Islamic Studies, Islamic Law, and early Islamic literature.
Jonathan E. Brockopp is an associate professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is the editor of and contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Mu_ hammad (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Introduction
Seventeen years ago, I was giving a lecture on the history of Islamic law at the University of Fez–Sais in Morocco. The students were bright, perceptive, and patient with my halting Arabic, but they objected to my main argument. My topic was a unique genre in the Arabic literary tradition, biographies of scholars, and my focus was on Qadi Iyad b. Musa (d. 544/ 1149), the great polymath from Ceuta, a figure well known to my Moroccan audience. What they could not accept was my suggestion that when writing biographies of the great figures from the early Islamic centuries, Iyad subtly manipulated their stories to fulfill his notion of what a great legal scholar should be. The students pelted me with questions: Are you a Muslim? How long have you been studying Arabic? Why aren’t you a Muslim?
My host, Professor Hamid Lahmar, was embarrassed and told the students they should focus on the substance of my talk, not on my personal characteristics. But I welcomed these questions and answered them as honestly as I could. Then I asked the students why they felt such questions were important: could it be that the accidents of my personal history (American, Christian, trained in the United States, Germany, and Egypt) could affect my reading of history? If this is so for me, then why not for Iyad b. Musa? It was one of those moments every teacher lives for; suddenly they understood that all readers of history are biased.
No matter how much we may try, we cannot study history for purely antiquarian interests. Not only is our reading of the past shaped by what we think is important, it is also limited by our individual capacities to understand human societies and motivations. When Iyad wrote about Malik or Sahnun (two great scholars from the past), he lived in a world where dreams, prophecies, and miraculous events were as real as dates of death and places of residence, what we normally call “facts.” Moreover, from Iyad’s perspective, dreams and prophecies might well be more indicative of the truth of the matter: that Malik and Sahnun were exemplary scholars, worthy of emulation.
As a scholar of religion, I am as interested in what Iyad makes of these exemplary scholars as I am in who “they actually were.”1 Yet in order to understand precisely what Iyad is doing with the historical material in front of him we must first, to the extent possible, reconstruct that history from materials not subject to his interpretations. Only then can we see the subtle manipulation of meaning by Iyad and other biographers. This book is therefore an attempt to reconstruct the history of Muslim scholars based primarily on documentary sources. It is important to note, however, that the preponderance of early material sources derives from the Muslim west.
The Umayyad caliphate had its seat in Damascus, but most of the administrative correspondence from that era has survived in Egypt. Likewise, we are told that Medina, Kufa, Baghdad, and other eastern cities were hotbeds of scholarly activity, yet the largest cache of early scholarly manuscripts comes from Kairouan in North Africa. Therefore, my methodological commitment to documentary evidence tilts this book west, and so it is western sources, such as Qadi Iyad’s writings, that I call on most for their view of history.
This book is not, however, merely a history of Muslim scholarship in North Africa; it rather attempts to define the very concept of a Muslim scholarly community and to account for the emergence of these communities from the very beginning of the Muslim story until the mid-tenth century.2 Furthermore, as I demonstrate below, early Muslim scholarly communities were highly connected with one another. The very mercantilism that grew the wealth of Fustat and Baghdad also allowed for an active exchange of books, letters, and ideas as scholars traveled widely throughout the Islamic world. In this one North African library, we see clear evidence of these activities, and so this collection can be used as a foundation for a much broader history.
The Kairouan collection, however, only begins to take shape two hundred years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. By that time, these scholars, known in Arabic as “people of knowledge” (ahl al-ʿilm) or simply “knowers” (ʿulamāʾ), were already well established. By the time that Iyad b. Musa is writing history in the twelfth century, these people, mostly but not all men, were marked off from other believers in several ways. Their schooling, their interaction with political authorities, their dress and public comportment – all were visible signs not only that they had mastered important facts about Islamic law, theology, and history, but also that they were keepers of a sacred trust. The knowledge they had was itself a gift from God, one of the ways that he guides his community along the straight path.
Whether jurists, judges, theologians, or muftis, they continue to perform many functions in Muslim societies, and it is quite difficult to imagine Islam without them. It is the very task of this book, however, to imagine Islam without the scholarly institutions that arose only centuries after Muhammad’s death. Part of the confusion lies in our English translation of the Arabic ʿulamāʾ, because the word “scholars” seems to suggest “schools,” that is, places of learning and a formal curriculum of study. But the Arabic word ʿulamāʾ is not so clear; it merely means “people who possess ʿilm.” That last word also is hard to comprehend, because ʿilm can mean both knowledge that is acquired over years of study and also knowledge that is gained directly from God as a grace from him.3 Further, these categories are generally thought to be related, such that great achievement in the mastery and interpretation of the sources is often taken to be a sign of God’s grace; exceptional individuals were even identified as mujaddidūn, renewers of the age.
To be an ʿālim, then, is to be recognized as having knowledge, and with this knowledge comes a kind of charisma. It is a divine gift, an intrinsic personal quality, and also a social phenomenon with tangible effects. All three of these elements (divine, personal, and social) are important, and in stories about the Prophet’s companions, scholars are portrayed as having had them all, in part. Later writers lionized this earliest generation, but they could not have functioned in Medinan society the way that scholars of the twelfth century (much less the twenty-first century) did; they may well have been people of knowledge, even with divine dispensations, but they had no schools and no program of training.
Therefore, I shall refer to these first generations as proto-scholars, individuals the memory of whom would be important for later generations, apart from what they actually may have accomplished. As I will discuss below, it is the process of memory by which writers such as Iyad b. Musa made these proto-scholars (Ali, Ibn Abbas, Abdullah b. Umar, and others) into exemplary individuals who, along with the “founders of legal schools,” would carve out a clear path for future scholars, thereby helping to establish that third, social, element of their scholarly nature. So while today the existence and importance of the ʿulamāʾ is well understood to be a central and vital part of this major world religious tradition, it was not always the case. Indeed, at various times and places it has not been scholars who led the community of Muslims but direct descendants of the Prophet, political leaders, Sufi mystics, and various other sorts of charismatic leaders, all of whom were held to be possessors of knowledge. This is certainly true in our own time, when many madrasas have become instruments of state control, and when politicians, physicians, journalists, and terrorists gladly speak in the name of Islam. Some observers, such as Khaled Abou El Fadl, have mourned this decline in the authority of the scholar as a particularly negative development of the modern age.4
It seems to me, however, that scholarly authority has always been in conflict with other forms of Muslim religious authority. Especially in the first two centuries of Islam’s history, when the role of scholars was vague and ill defined, there was little hint of the powerful institutions that would arise to guide Muslims when sultans and caliphs had seemingly abandoned religion. Abou El Fadl’s notion of scholarly interaction is less a historical description than an aspiration for the future. I am not saying that his depiction of a time when scholars freely debated with one another on the basis of reasoned analysis is inaccurate, only that it is incomplete.
Further, his historical analysis is explicitly a call to Muslims to support this sort of scholarly authority today. This is a reasonable use of history, but it is not my purpose in this book. Far from seeing scholarly authority as a natural, inevitable development, deriving from the Prophet’s own example, I see it as one of many competing visions of religious authority among early followers of Muhammad. Its development into a powerful and influential institution strikes me as not at all inevitable, and yet the roots of this institution have never been fully examined in the light of documentary evidence.
approaches to early muslim history Most books on the early history of Islam depend heavily on popular Muslim accounts that describe a satisfying story arc; it begins with Gabriel appearing to a humble prophet, moves to the establishment of an early Muslim state, and quickly jumps to Islam as a world religion with a splendid capital in Baghdad.5 Fred Donner calls this the “descriptive approach” because it simply refashions the Muslim narrative sources without subjecting them to critical analysis.6 Unfortunately, this approach runs the risk of glossing over some of the most interesting evidence. Over the past two hundred years, archeologists, papyrologists, numismatists, and other experts have patiently amassed an astounding trove of material from the early Islamic period.
Much of this research has been published in obscure academic journals, and few have taken the time to survey the evidence in a systematic way.7 But coins, glass weights, diplomatic correspondence, architecture, and other forms of material culture are a vital source for reconstructing early Islamic history. The stories told by these artifacts, however, do not neatly match the memory of early Muslim historians, writing centuries after the facts. These discrepancies have led to the rise of what Donner calls the “skeptical” view that casts doubt both on the dating of the Qurʾan and also (in its most radical form) on the historicity of Muhammad.8 These scholars reject Muslims’ accounts and attempt to describe the rise of Islam solely on the basis of these bits and pieces of evidence that serendipity has preserved for us. Not surprisingly, the stories that these two groups try to tell diverge strongly one from another. On the one hand, we have the familiar description of Muhammad as a prophet, initially rejected by his people, but eventually founding a community of believers in Medina. The scriptures revealed to him inspired a new movement after his death, one that struggled initially to find its identity through a series of civil wars, but which eventually triumphed, establishing a world empire in a few short decades that stretched from the Atlantic to the borders of India and China.
Islam, in this view, was complete just before the Prophet’s death as the Qurʾan itself seems to state in one of the last verses said to have been revealed: “Today I have perfected for you your religion and completed my favor on you and chosen for you Islam as a religion” (Qurʾan 5:3). On the other hand, the most ardent skeptics spin a yarn that begins not with Muhammad’s life, but with the establishment of empire by Arab leaders decades after Muhammad’s supposed death. There are no Muslims in this depiction; rather, the Arabs are Christian, devoted to Jesus as a “praised messenger of God” (mu_ hammad rasūl Allāh).9 Arising from the wars between the Byzantine and Persian empires, with their variant forms of Christianity, these “believers” cobble together recitations (qurʾān) from local churches and establish yet another form of Christian church. Eventually, an adjective initially referring to Jesus as one to be praised (mu_ hammad) is anthropomorphized into an Arabian prophet, and a back story of hardship, intrigue, and triumph is imagined for this character.
The first of these stories presents Islam as a triumph of God in history; the second presents Islam as a sham, built on borrowed foundations. As for which one is true, that depends on one’s previous commitments. Since both accounts ignore evidence, they reveal more about those writing history rather than what actually happened. In my view, the mistake made by both these groups of scholars is the granting of an identity and a substance to the notion of seventh-century Islam far out of proportion to what either the evidence or sociological theory would support. Modern scholars who adopt a descriptive approach (and consider the Qurʾan and early literary sources trustworthy) must take seriously the fact that even these sources do not support any unified narrative of the rise of Islam. The Qurʾan’s excoriating of the Bedouin for being merely muslim (obedient to Muhammad) and not muʾmin (true believers in the faith) in Sura 49:14 is precursor to divisive wars (of “apostasy” and fi _ tna) that the Muslim historians record in great detail. It is instructive to note that later generations do not depict these various groups as being non-Muslims, but as unacceptable forms of Muslim: hypocrites, apostates, secessionists, or extremists.
This is direct evidence that the legacy of Muhammad was contested, and that there were many different ideas on how best to be a “Muslim” during the seventh and eighth centuries. Further, such “Muslims” as may have existed after Muhammad’s death must have been a small minority in a world that continued to be dominated by Christian, Jews, and Zoroastrians for centuries. It is not really surprising that so many writers succumb to this descriptive approach; after all, the triumphal interpretations of Muslim historians make for a much better story. We should not expect “skeptical” scholars to make the same mistake, yet they do just that when they presume that the only possible form for Islam in the seventh century must have been the Islam of the ninth century, where Muhammad and the Qurʾan were recognized sources of knowledge and faith.10 The truth, I suggest, is much more interesting. Based both on what we know of the history of other world religions and also on a sociological understanding of the emergence of new religious movements, we should expect that the utter lack of institutions to enforce any single notion of Muhammad, the Qurʾan, or Islam during this early period made for a very wide variety of views. Some individuals in the seventh century may well have been convinced of the reality of Muhammad and the truth of his message, but these individuals seem to have differed widely on the details. Also, individual groups of devotees must have been small, disconnected, and without any power to impose their views on others.
Those of us committed to understanding this history need to develop methodologies for entertaining contradictory and even competing narratives,11 including theories of how scholars came to be the arbiters of Islam and of Islamic history. There is more: we should expect that individuals in the past were just as complex as people in the present. For example, we would certainly be mistaken if we thought that a powerful figure like the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik b. Marwan held on to precisely the same set of motivations throughout his life. Similarly, we should not imagine that a magnificent and complex monument, such as the Dome of the Rock built by Abd alMalik, should have been built with a single set of intentions.12
Finally, we should expect that public engagement with such a structure would be even more variant, with each individual bringing his or her own set of presumptions to the experience. We may draw the same conclusions about other sources on which we build our history – a coin from Muʿawiya’s reign, a historical account written two hundred years after the fact, even the Qurʾan itself – all must be subject to the same interpretive process. We cannot afford to ignore any of them, though we should not expect them to tell a single story. Rather, each piece of evidence is something like a broken fragment of a holograph. They all preserve information on the subject from a particular point of view; through careful analysis it is possible to use several fragments together to shed light on the whole. At the same time, that larger story should not detract from the integrity of the individual piece of evidence.
organization of this book I opened this book with a story about Qadi Iyad’s manipulation of stories, because I am concerned with both history and memory. By history, I mean the actual sociological circumstances that helped shape the ʿulamāʾ into a community of authoritative individuals. That history is partially reflected in artifacts – coins, papyri, architecture – that happen to have been preserved. By memory, I mean the stories that people like Iyad tell about those artifacts and the people who produced them. The very coherence of these stories reveals them to be interpretive acts; they give meaning to those lives, weaving them into broader narratives of power and legitimation.13 I want to be perfectly clear, however, that I consider both history and memory to be equally important, and I am well aware that in criticizing the interpretive acts of Qadi Iyad (along with those of Goldziher, Schacht, and others) I am also weaving a narrative out of scraps of evidence.
I cannot claim my version is better, only that it is responding to a different set of interests. After an overview of the sources here in this introduction, I begin in Chapter 1 by addressing the evidence about that first community, Muslims who are thought to have lived with the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, some of whom lived to see the establishment of the Umayyads in Damascus. Chapter 2 follows this chronological order, ending in 750 when I believe a true scholarly class begins to form. In a very real sense, however, the originating kernel of this book is found in Chapter 3, the early Abbasid period, when we finally have solid evidence that this scholarly community has emerged. In Chapters 4 and 5, I delve deeply into this documentary evidence to demonstrate how it can be used to undergird a history of early scholarly communities.14
Much of this evidence derives from a single community in North Africa, allowing for an extraordinarily detailed account of scholarly activity during this period. Because that community was strongly connected with similar communities in Andalusia, Egypt, Arabia, and Iraq, however, the evidence also allows for some preliminary judgments about the rise of scholarly communities in the rest of the Muslim world. This focus on North Africa is dictated by a unique set of ancient Arabic manuscripts more than one thousand years old. Not only are they among the earliest known examples of literary Arabic, they preserve texts from the late second and early third Islamic centuries (about 770–850 CE). In other words, these manuscripts are actual artifacts of a scholarly community that, beginning in the early ninth century, wrote copies of texts that were produced generations earlier. In doing so, they give us direct evidence of scholarly communities active by 780 at the latest. Chapters 1 and 2 are my attempt to push the boundary even earlier than 780, speculating on the rise of early scholarly communities even while maintaining my methodological commitments to depending primarily on material remains. The earlier we push this boundary, the thinner the evidence and so therefore the more speculative the arguments, but the result, I hope, is a consistent account of how the ʿulamāʾ may have arisen as a sociological force.
a review of the sources The primary sources for this study vary considerably from one period to the next. Documentary evidence for the seventh century is sparse – items of more durable material (coins, epigraphy) are represented out of proportion to other materials (such as papyri), and nearly all of these are from Egypt, which Muslim historical sources represent as either a province or a borderland (thaghr), not as a seat of either empire or scholarship. Our first dated witness to Arabic literary writing does not arise until 229/844, and it is a history of King David (attributed to Wahb b. Munabbih, d. 110/728 or 114/732) that has as much a Jewish character as an Islamic one.15 At about the same time, Abd al-Malik b. Habib (d. 238/852) was said to have composed his “History,” a copy of which has survived, although its authenticity has been questioned.
The late date of manuscripts for this and other literary texts, along with the manipulation of memory by historians, has led some modern scholars to reject literary sources altogether. But I believe this is an error. As I discuss in Chapter 1, an analysis of Ibn Habib’s account reveals some surprising insights into the individuals I term “proto-scholars.” Further, we do not have to depend solely on Muslim historians to learn about the ancient Muslim past; three other categories of evidence can help us reconstruct this early period: (1) material remains, such as documents, coins, architecture, and epigraphy; (2) historical accounts from non-Muslims; and (3) the ancient manuscripts from Kairouan.
Material Evidence Civilizations leave traces of their passing, and we have a surprising wealth of material sources for our study, even of the earliest period. From Arabic graffiti in caves to dated tax receipts on papyri, the rapid development of an Arabic (and perhaps Islamic) civilization in the seventh century is undeniable. Much of this material has been described by experts, but it is very hard to interpret; in fact, the same evidence can be drawn upon to support widely differing theories of the development of Islam. For our purposes, we must admit that coins, papyrus, and architecture give us almost no direct information about early Muslim scholars,16 but they do establish an important framework of fundamental information.
In 622, Middle Persian and Greek were the main languages represented in the sources, with some Coptic documents as well. Arabic may have been widespread as a spoken language, but written Arabic had only lately been derived from the Nabatean script and was still in the process of development.17 Already by 643, however, we have our first dated example of Arabic correspondence preserved on papyrus (Figure I.1). Like many other early papyri, this one is composed in both Arabic and Greek, part of a group of twenty-two papyri from Egypt, dating from the period AH 22–57 (643–677 CE).18 The Arabic here is formal and clear, with a surprisingly early use of dots to differentiate consonants, but it is the continued appearance of Greek in these papyri over the next hundred years that is of greatest interest, since it demonstrates that the new Arab rulers continued to use Byzantine forms.
Persian influence is also manifest. For example, the first datable use of the name Muhammad on an artifact is found not in the Arabic script, but in Pahlavi, inscribed on coins that continued to employ the iconography of the fallen Sasanid Empire: a Zoroastrian fire altar and the visage of the Emperor.19 Coins minted by Arabs in former Byzantine territories likewise bore crosses and depictions of the Byzantine Emperor. This continuity of usage is everywhere visible, from mundane tax receipts from Egypt20 to the spectacular Dome of the Rock (completed 72/691), which combines Arabic inscriptions with Byzantine architectural style. Not for another century would Arabic completely displace these other languages,21 and even then Persian (written in Arabic script) would see a revival. Cross-cultural influences in architecture would never fully disappear.
These cross-cultural influences are also apparent in the Qurʾan, our sole literary text from the seventh century. I consider the Qurʾan to be an early seventh-century document for several reasons. First, while our earliest dated Qurʾans are no earlier than other dated literary texts, we have far more ancient, dated manuscripts for the Qurʾan than for any other text (fourteen fragments dated to the third Islamic century).22 Second, some undated manuscripts of the Qurʾan can be reasonably argued to have been written before 700;23 no other literary text can make this claim. Third, the content of the Qurʾan is quite dissonant, in both substance and style, from classical Arabic texts of the ninth century.24 While Muslims may regard it as a record of revelation, given to the Prophet Muhammad piecemeal over the course of twenty-three years, I treat it as an archaic document that may well preserve material from the early seventh century and before.
To understand this document, however, several important caveats about its sociological function must be kept in mind. First, the written Qurʾan was secondary to the memorization and oral performance of the text – the manuscripts we possess are, in part, mnemonic devices that aided in its teaching and memorization. Second, this ritual and performative nature of the text was its primary function in the early period, represented by the talismanic usage of quotations in the earliest coins, architecture, and some papyri.26 Third, systematic attempts to connect specific verses to historical events, or to build legal or theological doctrines on specific verses, or to analyze grammatical usages – in short, systematic exegeses of any kind – date from the second/eighth century at the earliest.27
In other words, I find that the evidence suggests that the compilation of the Qurʾan occurred only a decade or two after the death of the Prophet; at the same time, I hold that the canonization of the Qurʾan as the primary source of divine knowledge was a much longer process that took centuries.28 In the present study, the Qurʾan therefore has three distinct roles: (1) a record of Muhammad’s views of scholars and scholarship in the early seventh century (or, more piously expressed, God’s views as revealed through Muhammad); (2) a material witness to the activities of proto-scholars who wrote the earliest manuscript fragments we now possess; and (3) a religious authority invoked by and interpreted by later groups of scholars.
Non-Arabic Literary Sources Given the sheer weight of Islamic history, it is hard to regard the Qurʾan and other documentary evidence outside the powerful interpretive lens of Muslim memory. Contemporary accounts in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Persian are therefore particularly valuable, as they also bore witness to the rise of this new Arab polity. Numerous references to the conquering Arabs in non-Arabic sources give us a complex picture, though once again direct information on Islam or scholars is lacking. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, offers us some of our first impressions of the Arab conquests in his Christmas sermon from 634.29 An account from one “Thomas the Presbyter” gives us our first datable mention of Muhammad in non-Muslim accounts, noting that “there was a battle between the Romans and the Arabs of Mu _ hammad (_ tayyāyē d-M_ hm_ t) in Palestine twelve miles east of Gaza.”30 As with accounts from Arab historians, these literary impressions were often collected and written down centuries after the events themselves, yet they offer us a valuable perspective on the period.31
The names given to these conquerors were _ tayyāyē (meaning Arab), Saracen, and mhaggrāyē, a Syriac version of the Arabic muhājir. 32 The terms Muslim and Islam do not appear in the earliest of these sources, just as they are not found in coins or papyri from the earliest period. This absence is a useful reminder that in the perspective of the broader world of the seventh century, Islam did not yet exist. Nonetheless, I do not agree with those skeptics who doubt the existence of Muhammad, nor even with Fred Donner, who suggests that we call these people the “believers’ movement” and that “it would be historically inaccurate to call the early Believers’ movement ‘Islam’.”33 As I have argued elsewhere, such assertions conflate public expression of religion with the religion itself.34 What we can say is that such Muslims as may have existed in the seventh century were part of a small, private, minority movement within already established Christian, Zoroastrian, and Jewish religious worlds. And many of the early Muslims may not have strongly distinguished themselves from their Christian (or Jewish or Zoroastrian) neighbors. That a new religion emerged intact from this sectarian environment at all is remarkable, and that, I will argue, is the chief legacy of the emerging scholarly community.
The Manuscripts of Kairouan, Tunisia As I suggested above, the treasures of the mosque-library of Kairouan have dramatically changed our knowledge of the first Islamic centuries. As recently as 1989, François Déroche could identify only fourteen manuscripts written in Arabic (excluding Qurʾans and Christian writings) that could be securely dated before AH 300. Of these, six came from the mosque-library of Kairouan in the modern nation of Tunisia. Since then, eighteen more manuscripts dated before 300 have come to light, seventeen of which come from Kairouan (listed in the Appendix). Not only has our evidentiary basis for studying Muslim scholars more than doubled, the majority of this ancient material derives from a single location. The importance of this shift in evidence has not been widely appreciated, and so this book focuses on the ways that this rich material evidence can form a framework of inquiry, grounding our reading of literary sources. For example, Donner, following Fuat Sezgin and many others, gives us a list of “books” on history written by Muslims, including twenty-four authors who lived before Wahb b. Munabbih, putative author of the earliest dated literary manuscript.35 However, analysis of the Kairouan manuscripts suggests that this list is all but meaningless.
First, we have no material evidence of books (in the sense of authored texts) from such an early period. Further, even when we do find books (around AH 200), we continue to see fluid texts of mixed authorship for many generations. Second, we do have sparse evidence for some texts that antedate authored books, but these appear to be simple compilations of reports (a _ hādīth or akhbār) with no ordering principle and little authorial control. Third, Donner suggests that we can see “rough trends” in early historical scholarship from such a list of titles, yet again, the Kairouan manuscripts demonstrate that titles were fungible, often attached to a text long after its composition. Finally, Donner’s list might give the impression of a scholarly culture based on written materials in the seventh century, when our evidence (as Donner himself admits) points rather to an oral culture with some written materials. This is important because of the distinction I maintain between proto-scholars (individual savants who passed on knowledge in an informal manner) and scholars (who worked together in interconnected communities).
As I discuss in Chapter 3, the Kairouan manuscripts allow us to prove the existence of a mature scholarly community just before the beginning of the third/ninth century. By this, I mean that scholars at that point had begun to write actual books, a notion that I restrict to a text written in a uniform style in a single effort and then passed on to other scholars verbatim. To have books therefore means to have a community that can maintain the discipline necessary for the faithful transmission of these texts. Further, these earliest books are both first- and second-order texts. First-order texts are those that attempt to clarify rules of ritual or practice, establishing a practical guide for Muslims to follow.36 Secondorder texts are of value only to a very specialized group of readers, because they are interested in the small details, interstitial categories, and controversies that arise after application of these first-order rules.37
In other words, these are sophisticated texts that had moved beyond the simple collection of authoritative statements of the Prophet and other legal authorities, though this process of collection continued through the ninth century and beyond. However, if the appearance of this community is the beginning of one sociological process (the ʿulamāʾ as a significant social and religious force), it is the end of another, and so the question I attempt to answer in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book is: what was the sociological foundation from which that scholarly community arose? I am not the first to ask this question.
Literary Evidence During the ninth century, as the scholarly community matured, it sought to establish its own congruence with the history of Islam.38 One of the earliest of these texts is the Taʾrīkh of Abd al-Malik b. Habib (d. 238/ 853). Already in the ninth century, it was impossible for Ibn Habib to imagine a history of Islam without a scholarly class, and his Taʾrīkh insists that every generation of Muslims was led by scholars. As we will see in Chapter 1, however, he is hard pressed to identify many of these scholars by name and gives very little evidence of their scholarly accomplishments. His text, however, was antecedent to a very productive genre in Islamic scholarly history, the biographical dictionary.39 As this genre developed, single texts would include hundreds of short biographies (and many longer ones), listing the scholars of past generations and their major accomplishments. By the time this genre of writing reached its mature state, in the eleventh century, the ʿulamāʾ had been well established as key authority figures for centuries, deeply rooted in the tradition. It is certainly true that these texts were first written down only centuries after the facts discussed in this book, and that their authors often had political and historical preferences that caused them to suppress or fabricate memory.40
Also, it would be fair to say that literary sources are not always interested in historical truth, but sometimes preserve stories merely for their entertainment or hermeneutic value. Nonetheless, these texts remain a vital resource for our study for three reasons. First, and perhaps most obviously, these texts are often our only source of information about many persons and events in early Islamic history. To abandon them because of their problematic nature is simply to consign much of this history to oblivion.41 Second, all literary texts are not alike. Texts written for widely differing purposes (grammatical explication, legal exegesis) can “accidentally” contain important historical facts,42 and manuscript analysis can reveal the additions and deletions of later generations as texts are copied.
Third, literary texts do not come to us in isolation, but can be read in the context of other evidence. Because of the unique manuscript evidence from Kairouan, I draw primarily on literary sources from the Maliki tradition. Unlike prosopographical texts from other schools of law and theology, many of the second- and third-century figures mentioned in the Maliki biographical dictionaries are represented in the manuscript tradition, either as authors, scribes, students, or owners of manuscripts. Further, in the case of Ibn Habib and Abu l-Arab, we find their own texts among these manuscripts and, in the case of Abu l-Arab, his personal hand-written copies. Therefore, the manuscripts provide independent verification of some of the activities and acquaintances of these biographers.
Beyond the biographical dictionary, other literary texts occasionally offer insights as to the workings of scholars. These include accounts of the Prophet’s life and that of his earliest companions (mostly concerned with political and military matters) and collections of traditions (_ hadīth). One might well imagine the original, oral nature of these stories as the Prophet’s accomplishments, along with those of pre-Islamic Arab heroes such as Antar and Imru l-Qays, would have been remembered and performed wherever there were Arabs to hear them.
Attempts have been made to reconstruct some of these early narratives, such as the Life of the Prophet by Ibn Ishaq (d. 150/767), from fragments preserved in literary texts written centuries later.43 There are also political histories that give us detailed background for some of the names and expressions we see on coins and papyri and specialized histories of bureaucrats. For example, alJahshiyari (d. 331/942) wrote an important history of bureaucracy (Kitāb al-wuzarāʾ wa l-kuttāb) through the year 296/908. But the unique manuscript that preserves his text was written hundreds of years later.
Likewise, early legal texts may preserve material that stems from even earlier periods, but with all of these, teasing out that earliest layer is difficult and controversial. Many of these texts are based on an oral literature known as _ hadīth. In its simplest form, a _ hadīth is a narrative introduced by a chain of authorities, such as the following well-known _ hadīth: Scholars are the heirs of the prophets who have endowed them with knowledge as a legacy. He who has chosen knowledge has taken a generous share, and he who has taken a path towards the acquisition of knowledge, for him God will smooth a path to Paradise.44
In this book, I take a generally skeptical view of our ability to argue the authenticity of individual _ hadīth, 45 and my analysis does not depend on an ability to determine whether individuals in the chain of transmission fabricated or simply passed on words attributed to the Prophet. I do accept, however, that generations of proto-scholars and scholars engaged in the transmission of _ hadīth. Further, examination of early manuscripts helps us to isolate key nodes of activity that can help corroborate other evidence in reconstructing the earliest communities of Muslim scholars. To summarize this overview of the sources, my study presumes that any history of early Muslim scholars must conform to what we know about early Islamic history based on documentary evidence.
This gives us two boundaries that are fairly secure. In the earliest period (622–680 CE), we can affirm that there were no Islamic scholarly institutions and no Arabic books (save perhaps the Qurʾan).46 There must have been, however, knowledge and awareness of scholars in the established religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. History seems to suggest that this was a period of nearly constant warfare, both wars of conquest and various civil wars, but what little material evidence we have suggests an administration that was professional and effective. It is reasonable to expect, therefore, that our earliest scholars were engaged in the bureaucracy, yet evidence seems to suggest that they were individuals somewhat set apart from the vicissitudes of politics who had the leisure and inclination to devote time to the collection and passing on of memory on an oral basis to the next generation. The second boundary is met in 200/815 by which point we have overwhelming evidence of selfconscious scholarly communities. Chapters 1 and 2 lead up to that second boundary, while Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are devoted to explaining the history of those earliest communities.
authority and “connectivity” The above-quoted _ hadīth, “scholars are the heirs of the prophets,” points to one central question for this book: that of authority and legitimation. The question is important because it is not at all obvious how a religion survives the death of the founding figure with his direct, charismatic authority. The early history of Islam is littered with the murdered bodies of pretenders to the Prophet’s authority, including those of his son-in-law Ali and his grandson Husayn. The Umayyad princes, who eventually took power in Damascus in 661, seem to have ruled more like Byzantine emperors than like the Arab tribal leaders from whom they were descended. Meanwhile, other Arab leaders claimed holdings of the former Byzantine and Persian empires for their own, establishing virtually independent fiefdoms far from the grip of Damascus. In reviewing the evidence, I find that Muslims survived the turmoil of their first century largely without the help of scholars. Only after the year 200/815 when scholars were relatively well established did they begin to play a legitimizing role, and soon thereafter it became impossible to imagine Islam without them.
As I see it, the biographical dictionary was both the record and the device by which their scholarly authority was made known to others. This unique form of literature has been widely studied, and I make use of it in this book to contrast its interpretation of history with the evidence from the material sources. There is, however, another famous _ hadīth that is central to understanding the ʿulamāʾ, yet it points to a very different role for scholars: “Seek knowledge even if in China.”47 Three aspects of this short phrase are worth noting. First, the command to seek (u _ tlubū) is related to the Arabic word for student (_ tālib). Communities of scholars were not merely made of leaders, but also of followers, students who ensured the legacy of their masters by writing down their texts and passing on stories of their exemplary actions.
A list of students is an essential part of any entry in a biographical dictionary, and ancient manuscripts preserve the names of many other students whose identity is otherwise lost to us. Second, the notion of “knowledge” in this _ hadīth is clearly not something restricted to “Islamic” sources, such as Qurʾan and _ hadīth, for then there would be no reason to travel to China for it. Rather, knowledge is a more universal concept, and the philosophers would explain that all knowledge is from God, who himself is the all-knowing, the source of the active intellect.
This perception leads to the third point, connectivity.48 Whatever else we may say about early Islamic history, it is full of movement. From the Prophet’s night journey and hijra to the conquests, we see great movements of peoples in the seventh century. And this movement continues into the mercantilism of the eighth century. If we see scholars only as those who draw the lines of orthodoxy, then we miss their roles as travellers and boundary crossers who traverse great distances (both physically and conceptually) to seek knowledge. In the communities reflected in the Kairouan manuscripts, scholars, books, and ideas travel the shores of the Mediterranean just as easily as commodities, such that regional capitals in North Africa and Spain are closely connected to Damascus, Medina, and Baghdad and begin to rival them as centers of learning. For this reason, evidence from a library in North Africa can be highly informative of the Muslim scholarly project in general.
To return to the definition I offered at the beginning of this introduction: scholarly knowledge is an intrinsic personal quality, a social phenomenon with tangible effects and also a divine gift. Historically, we see this first when individuals live an exemplary life by mirroring the life of the Prophet. Of course, there are many ways to do this, and later writers classify such individuals as mystics, ascetics, warriors, or scholars, but the key element is a personal decision to devote oneself to Muhammad’s example, or at least to describe one’s activities as devoted in this way. Over time, as generations become further removed from the sources of authority, it is mastery of the religious sources that becomes key.
Initially, these sources are limited to knowledge of the Qurʾan and the Prophet’s life story, but eventually the sources expand to include not only Qurʾan and _ hadīth, but also commentary on these, rules of grammar, modes of reasoning, and other products of the scholarly process. The spread of Muslims in the world also requires authority to be passed on through personal contact: traveling in search of knowledge, living with exemplary scholars, treating scholarly books as relics, and recreating simulacra of authoritative places (especially Medina) in new territories. I place divine authority last in terms of historical development, which is exactly opposite to the way that Iyad b. Musa imagines history. In his view, scholars are authoritative because God willed them to be so, a point he proves through careful interpretation of Qurʾanic texts. But historically the aura of divine authority arrives last, as scholars are late to crown their achievements with the inevitability of divine foreordainment. It is not the purpose of this book to argue what God actually does, but in terms of sociological effect, it is clear that by claiming the mantle of the Prophet, scholars wield real authority in Muslim societies, giving them the support to stand up against political and other powers.
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