Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta

Muḥammad b. Khalaf Wakīʿ (m. 306/918), ou le désamour de Bagdad

Mathieu Tillier — 2024-01-25

This article provides an overview of the life and work of a historian largely overlooked by contemporary historiography, Muhammad b. Khalaf al-Ḍabbī, known as Wakīʿ (d. 306/918). This Baghdadian scholar and qadi authored several works in various fields, only one of which has come down to us in a single manuscript: the Akhbār al-quḍāt, one of the earliest sources on the history of Islamic judgeship. Wakīʿ received fierce criticism from his fellow scholars and their successors, before most of his work fell into oblivion. After tracing his training and career, I examine the author’s views about Baghdad. The marginal role he assigns to the Abbasid capital, in connection with the miḥna of the mid-third/ninth century, suggests that this period of inquisition traumatized historians who came from scholarly backgrounds, and had a profound impact on Islamic historiography.

From Trial (Miḥna) to Tribulation (Balāʾ)

Antonio Musto — 2024-02-08

The execution of al-Ḥallāj (d. 309/922) and Ghulām Khalīl’s (d. 275/888) inquisition (miḥna) against the Sufis have loomed large in the historiography of Sufism. These events are often depicted as instances of anti-Sufi prosecution that fundamentally reshaped Sufism, causing later Sufis to align it more closely with “normative” Islam. While modern scholarship has recently challenged the influence and impact attributed to al-Ḥallāj's fate, this article expands this critical perspective to Ghulām Khalīl’s miḥna, details of which are provided across numerous sources. For the first time, these narratives will be critically examined highlighting problematic aspects that call into question its historicity. More importantly, however, this article looks to the way in which Sufis themselves engaged with and presented this miḥna in texts from the third/ninth century onward. Rather than being something to be answered for or contended with, Sufis offered these narratives as examples of tribulation (balāʾ) and connected them to a wide array of Sufi concepts, including altruism (īthār), forbearance (ṣabr), gratitude (shukr), and contentment with God (riḍā), among other interpretive frames. This article revisits a core element of the historiography of early Sufism and sheds light on the place of tribulation in the “universe of meaning” of early Sufis.

Will I Be Happy, Will I Be Rich?

Kristof D'hulster — 2024-04-16

This article deals with a collection of three divinatory lot books (qurʿas) that were once owned by Qāniṣawh al-Muḥammadī, an early tenth/sixteenth-century governor of Mamluk Damascus: Qurʿat al-Imām Jaʿfar, Qurʿat al-Dawāzdahmarj, and al-Qurʿa al-mubāraka al-maʾmūniyya. Beginning with a transcription and translation of their introductions and some samples of their main texts, I analyze the books’ divinatory technique and show it to be a combination of choice and chance, the latter generated either through a muqāraʿa or through a khaṭṭ procedure. I lay bare the mechanics that inform the seemingly haphazard arrangement of the 3,856 divinations included in the books, identify the books’ sources in Quranic or (Perso-)Indic astrology, and conclude with a discussion of the historicity of the various user strategies, based on supplementary manuscript evidence. In the appendix, I provide a full transcription and translation of the first lot book, with instructions for making one’s own divinatory device.