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.

The Documentary Depth of Hadith Transmission

Said Aljoumani — 2024-05-21

The transmission of hadith prompted substantial documentation and subsequent archiving. This article presents a recently rediscovered type of document belonging to this paper trail: audition attendance lists (awrāq al-samāʿ). Preceding the better-known audition certificate (samāʿ), an audition attendance list was sometimes used in the transmission of particularly long books in order to keep track of the attendance of sometimes hundreds of participants in audition sessions. Here we concentrate on one audition attendance list produced in the ninth/fifteenth century in Cairo for a transmission of the most famous hadith collection, the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. We introduce this kind of document, propose a reading of our particular sample, and discuss certain functions of audition attendance lists. We argue that these lists reveal a hitherto unknown depth in the documentary machinery of textual transmission.

La khuṭba d’Abū Ḥamza al-Shārī

Enki Baptiste — 2024-05-30

The present paper investigates the famous khuṭba attributed to Abū Ḥamza al-Shārī, an Ibāḍī warlord on behalf of ʿAbd Allāh b. Yaḥyā. In the middle of the 2nd/8th century, he seized Mecca and Medina as the outcome of an Ibāḍī rebellion that had begun in the remote region of Ḥaḍramawt. The khuṭba has been well-known for decades, as fragments are scattered throughout various Sunnī and Shīʿī sources. However, few studies have addressed the broader context of the sermon so far, or offered a comprehensive translation of it. This article is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to the history of Ibāḍism in the Arabian Peninsula during the 2nd/8th century. We propose explanatory hypotheses to understand the various reasons that led ʿAbd Allāh b. Yaḥyā to rebel against the Umayyad dynasty. We also offer a commentary on the khuṭba to help in its reading. The second part contains an extensive translation based on a longer version of the khuṭba found in a little-known eighteenth-century Ibāḍī source, the Kashf al-ghumma al-jāmiʿ li-akhbār al-umma, drafted in Oman and attributed to Ibn Sirḥān al-Izkawī.

Learning Middle Armenian at the Court of Meḥmed II

Samet Budak — 2024-08-20

Shortly after the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman court of Meḥmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81) began to produce language-learning primers that would teach significant languages of statecraft and knowledge production from around the Mediterranean world. This article sheds light on the court’s pedagogical and ideological engagement with multilingualism through one primer in particular, which bears the shelf mark Ahmet III 2698 in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. We name this primer Meḥmed II’s Hexaglot Grammar, as it was produced for his court and contains an array of languages within it: Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Ancient Greek, Byzantine Greek, Latin, and, finally, the vernacular tongue of Middle Armenian. The presence of many of these languages may seem more readily apparent, but what was Middle Armenian doing at the Ottoman court? As we show, Middle Armenian had a presence at court in more ways than one. Alongside the Hexaglot Grammar, the court also produced an extensive primer for learning the Armenian alphabet (MS Ayasofya 4767, Süleymaniye Library). So, too, did producers of knowledge in Middle Armenian find a home at court, such as Amirdovlat‘ Amasiac‘i, a physician whose extensive corpus of pharmacopeia in Middle Armenian likely made use of the palace library. By exploring the circulation of diverse manuscripts, translators, and intellectuals in Constantinople alongside primers such as the Hexaglot Grammar, this article offers a portrait of the Ottoman court never before seen: a place where the premodern Armenian vernacular not only survived, but, for a time, even thrived.

Unlearning the Aesthetics of Malicious Joy

Adam Talib — 2024-09-07

Bodies that are gendered and sexualized through the male gaze appear frequently in the study of classical Arabic poetry, but learned reading practices predetermine how these descriptions are interpreted. These reading practices, which students learn to this day, are connected to a reception tradition that emerged to suit the logics and investments of premodern Arabic anthologies. A critical intervention, this article begins by comparing the presentation of saliva metaphors in erotic poetry to other bodily and relational unmentioneds through a discussion of taste, tradition, and training. In the second half of the article, the reception of a famous teaching text by Bashshār b. Burd (d. 783) is juxtaposed with the pedagogically invested criticism of the Egyptian critic Mohamed al-Nowaihi (d. 1980), who confronted the poem on ethical and presentist terms.

Mail-Order Mihrabs

Patricia Blessing — 2024-10-14

When studying tile revetments of monuments in Iran from the late twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century and in the fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire, one is faced with two very different narratives as to how the design and production of these revetments came about. The luster tiles installed in Iran and beyond were produced in one city, Kashan, by well-documented families of tile-makers who left a wide range of signed tiles and vessels. Tiles produced in the Ottoman Empire between the 1410s and the 1470s are attributed to the “Masters of Tabriz,” an elusive group construed to be a multi-generational, itinerant workshop based on a single signature on the mihrab of the mosque-zāviye of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed I (r. 1413–21) in Bursa (1419–21). In a comparative study of these two contexts, this article offers insights into ways of producing and logistics of transporting and installing large-scale tile revetments, and argues that in the Ottoman case, too, production may have taken place at a single site.

Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies

Taryn Marashi — 2024-10-24

In the year 250/864–65, Baghdad’s governor Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir ordered the defilement of a prisoner’s corpse and grave site. The prisoner, Isḥāq b. Jināḥ, had been a criminal magistrate serving the rebel leader Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar, who had led a failed revolt in Kufa against the Abbasid caliphate (132–650/750–1258). According to the fourth/tenth-century historian al-Iṣbahānī, the governor demanded that the deceased Isḥāq b. Jināh not receive a funerary prayer, corpse-washing, or a burial shroud. Moreover, he ordered the corpse to be immersed in water in a grave and buried at a Jewish ruin. The governor’s intentional neglect of proper Islamic funerary rituals is shocking but not entirely surprising. Medieval Islamic political chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and social commentaries abound with darkly salacious reports of corpse neglect and even violence, shining a light on the efforts of the living to affect the dead. Why would anyone seek to “harm” a corpse? And what purpose did medieval Islamic historical narratives of necroaggression serve? This article addresses the narrative power of corpse violence in Greater Iraq during the mid-third/ninth and early fourth/tenth centuries, investigating the political meanings inscribed on bodies unmade by others. Viewing necroaggression as a type of performative political act, the article examines a vibrant polemical discourse that toyed with administrative concerns over coercion as well as popular anxieties over possible sensations experienced postmortem.

“Out of Love for You”

Tonicha Mae Upham — 2024-11-17

This article approaches gender and power through the study of emotion as a means of refreshing and updating the study of Rūs gender using Arabic geographical sources. Considering Arabic geographical and historical sources on the Rūs that deal with the concept of funerary sacrifice, in particular those that posit the possibility of male as well as female sacrificial victims, I examine the conditions attached to the practice of sacrificing men in these sources. I do so primarily by focusing on the semantic usages of ḥubb (love) as it relates to the Rūs, exploring the potential for wider emotional exploration within geographical discussions of the Rūs and in the context of their use by researchers today.